Another glitch on GitHub - moving back to Gaggle.mail?

[RedshiftDrift]

Some of you noticed that the ACG Discussions webpage stopped working, starting yesterday.
This was caused by another glitch from Microsoft-owned GitHub.
I opened a ticket with GitHub and the problem was fixed.

However, GitHub Support commented:

"the level of dedicated support you're seeking is available exclusively as part of a paid GitHub plan, Copilot Business, or Copilot Enterprise."

Even the cheapest GitHub Team Plan is $40/month total... After losing discussion #127 (See #389) on September 1st, recurring upgrade problems with the website, and now this "stale category index" problem, I find myself spending a lot of time to maintain this forum and the website. And that's not mentioning what may happen to GitHub through the political turmoil in the US of A.

I propose to move "ACG Discussions" back to Gaggle mail, where we were hosted four years ago. That platform offers a similar email/web interface, but I haven't seen much downtime on it. There are already 30 members on it, we are allowed up to 100 members for the same price, so the move is 'free'! What we will lose is the ability to write equations in the messages. I suggest we attach .pdf documents when there is a lot of math.

As for the website, I would move it to WHC, the administrator of our domain names cosmology.info and cosmologystatement.org. I can add the ACG website to my personal website at almost no extra cost, and WHC is outside the US of A.

The big advantage for me is the reduced time wasted on maintenance.

[Francois-Zinserling]

I know we went through all this before Github but what was the verdict on Discord?

[Francois-Zinserling]

Also - let us know how we can assist.

[RedshiftDrift]

I think the goal at the time was to have a platform where both the website and the discussion forum were together, so members could freely modify the website as they wished and discuss on the same platform. GitHub offered that for free and web hosting was also free, so ACG moved there.

[RedshiftDrift]

A pitch for Gaggle.mail: Only ~3 members took advantage of the ability to modify the website offered by GitHub, and I had to intervene almost every time. Some former members did not move to GitHub because the system is not as intuitive enough. (Remember that the typical member of ACG is retired and not very tech-savvy.) The "listserv" system with emails works best for most members.

There is now another problem that was not so serious four years ago: the geopolitical situation. The US of A is slowly but steadily sliding into a dictatorship, and web barriers are getting higher around the US. Russian and Iranian ACG members were cutoff from accessing GitHub (I wonder why 🤔...) and this is only going to spread to other countries. So I am trying to move away from any services that are US based. (The domains cosmology.info and cosmologystatement.org are administrated by WHC in Montréal!)

Looking at a few alternatives, Discourse, Discord, Element, Zulip, Groups.io, Mailman (in Oz), and other more primitive services... Gaggle.mail still seems like the best choice. The server allows for an unlimited number of groups, which could conveniently created for each main topic discussed on ACG ("Variable mass theory", "Cosmological Surveys", "Push Gravity", "Rotation curves", "MultiBang", NTL", etc.) often associated with a single member! Moderation privileges can also be given to any member for any group. Since the discussion group is open to anyone, this is useful for moderation of new members or for those who want to 'read' but never post anything!

A listserv also gives us inbox sovereignty. Messages live in your own personal email inbox, meaning no single company/country can lock us out of our conversation history overnight, and everybody has a backup of every discussion.

[RedshiftDrift]

For members who want anonymity, "Incognito Mode" is available in Gaggle.mail. Member emails are hidden by default to keep them private; only the 'display name' is visible. You can log into the Gaggle.mail web portal and change your display name to an alias.

[RedshiftDrift]

Unfortunately the "Incognito mode" also prevents users from reading the Message Archives. Members who want to remain anonymous will have to use an alias email.

[luisenrique-arch]

Someone suggested creating a Discord server. I’m pretty familiar with Discord, so if you guys want, I can set one up in less than a minute. The only catch is that I can’t do it until tonight, since I have to go to another city right now.

Alternatively, we could set up a forum with a similar format to this one. It’s really easy to write posts in this kind of forum since everything is in Markdown, which is pretty straightforward to learn. I don’t think this kind of format supports mathematical equations, though.

[Francois-Zinserling]

I get Louis' concern about US products, of which Discord is one.

Your link requires a login so I can't see the forum. Can it be localised to just our group?

It may be more efficient to search for or build a forum that supports equations

[RedshiftDrift]

@Francois-Zinserling thank you for offering technical help. I know you would have the technical knowledge to build a forum that supports equations. However I must decline because when the tech-savvy volunteer leaves, the fancy webpage and discussion forum becomes unmaintainable.

This has happened before: In 2012 someone offered to build a fancy website for ACG, where webpages and discussions would coexist. The site was partially built but when the person left, nobody wanted to pickup the work and complete it. ACG was in limbo starting in 2012, and neither Eric Lerner nor Hilton Ratcliffe had time for this.

ACG members should focus on cosmology work, not on computer code and servers.

[RedshiftDrift]

It's actually not too complicated to send equations by email. Use upmath.me to convert Latex/markdown-Mathjax to html code, then insert as html in the email and send to Gaggle mail.

Here's a screenshot, not bad at all.

To join the group use the link https://gaggle.email/join/a-cosmology@gaggle.email. You can see the message I sent and the overall web interface.

@luisenrique-arch the web interface in Gaggle.mail is a simple text editor. For equations you can send an email to the forum, with the result below.

[RedshiftDrift]

The backup of the GitHub Discussions will look like this partial backup on the ACG website, so we can reference older threads.

[luisenrique-arch]

I subscribed to the new group.

[HanDeBruijn]

Me too.

[ExpEarth]

I subscribed also. Louis, what about the Apeiron archive? Should I expedite getting it moved to the Internet Archive?

…

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[RedshiftDrift]

The Apeiron archive will remain at cosmology.info/apeiron/ wherever it is physically hosted, there's no rush.

However, Apeiron should get it's own domain name (e.g. apeironjournal.ca or apeiron-archive.ca at $15/yr)...

[genotics]

I just picked up on this thread. I will look into securing a domain name. Thanks for your hard work.

[genotics]

As of today I own the domain name apeironsci.uk. Are any further steps necessary?

[RedshiftDrift]

The next step is to ask Cloudflare to redirect apeironsci.uk to https://cosmology.info/apeiron/.
When they browse, visitors will see the https://cosmology.info URL in the browser's address.

If you want visitors to see apeironsci.uk rather than cosmology.info, you can ask Cloudflare to set it up accordingly.

---

Is Cloudflare your Domain Name Server, or did you just buy apeironsci.uk from them? I'm asking because it could be possible to use WHC.ca as a DNS from the same account as cosmology.info (this may be cheaper? I'm not sure.) We can set that up later...

[ExpEarth]

I wonder if ACG will survive the move to Gagglemail. Perhaps we shouldn't worry if we lose a thread or two due to being at a non-paying level. Here is a broader context to think about. Science discussion groups are to some extent threatened by the powerful AIs. I don't know about you guys, but I have found the level of interaction with AIs on my scientific stuff to be astonishing. It's easy to imagine that our group members could drift into AI-exclusive discussion modes. That would be a loss to science though (and in all fields). Somehow we have to keep discussing our ideas! I haven't seen any action in Gagglemail and so I'm wondering if we should keep this present site going even with technical glitches.

[RedshiftDrift]

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