[SIGCIS-Members] Mailing List Migration

[Gregor Zurowski]

Thanks for raising this. It's a fair concern, but please let me elaborate:

No content is lost. Every message and attachment in the list's history
is migrated to the new archive, which will be fully searchable. What
changes is the URL format. The current archive uses the Pipermail
scheme, so existing deep links to specific messages won't resolve.

The old links can be preserved by generating a complete redirect map
from the archive (the new URL is based on a hash of each post's
message ID). But serving these redirects involves running and
maintaining a redirect layer in front of lists.sigcis.org (e.g., using
Cloudflare CDN). For the initial migration, we've chosen to keep the
number of moving parts to a minimum.

But we can produce a redirect map from the archive at a later point,
if it turns out specific archived posts are widely cited, and the
broken links become a real problem (I couldn't find any online, but
Google might not have indexed relevant pages, or people may have saved
them in private documents or bookmarks). We can revisit this topic and
create the redirect layer then. At this point, we would like to
migrate to the new host, as the current host deprecated the mailing
list feature on short notice.

Thanks,
Gregor


On Thu, Jun 25, 2026 at 8:24 PM Marcin Wichary <mwichary at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I think it’d be good to migrate without breaking URLs – there are technologies (server redirects) that should make it possible to do it automatically, with only minimal one-time effort to generate matching static redirects. As the current archive has messages going all the way to 2008, it feels the blast radius of link breakage will be significant without that.
>
> Best,
>
> Marcin
>
> On Thu, Jun 25, 2026 at 1:12 PM Gregor Zurowski via Members <members at lists.sigcis.org> wrote:
>>
>> Hi Everyone:
>>
>> The provider hosting this mailing list is about to terminate their
>> service in the next couple of weeks. We plan to re-host the list with
>> a new provider in the coming days. During this process, the mailing
>> list software will be upgraded to a newer version. The complete mail
>> archive will be migrated, but it will be accessible through a new user
>> interface. As a result, links to the current archive at [1] will
>> break.
>>
>> For example, if you cited or otherwise linked to an archived message
>> like the one below, the link will no longer work and result in a "not
>> found" page:
>>
>> http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/2026-June/009106.html
>>
>> The new archive will use a different URL scheme for links. These will
>> look like this (please note that the following is just an example and
>> isn't functional):
>>
>> https://lists.sigcis.org/archives/list/members@lists.sigcis.org/thread/FVEK3SJNDMXXXX47Z3JK3YJ4I66HYN6F/
>>
>> Hopefully, this will not cause any problems for any of you.
>>
>> We are currently finalizing the exact migration date with the new
>> provider and will announce it on this list soon. Any messages sent
>> during the migration may end up in the old system and therefore won't
>> be included in the new archive. To prevent this, don't send any
>> message on the announced day until the migration is complete, which we
>> will inform you about in a separate email.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Gregor
>>
>> [1] http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/
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