Friday, February 22, 2008

Domain names not for sale

We regularly get inquiries about the perl.org, perlmonks.org etc domains like the following:



We are interested in purchasing your domain name. If interested, please let me know what it takes to buy it.

If agreeable, we can finalize the deal through escrow.com Monday.



Our typical response:



Hi $spammer,

One billion USD. Non-sequential twenty dollar bills preferred, but not required.



You pay the escrow.com fees.





Thanks,



- ask



p.s. no, it's not really for sale.



Monday, February 18, 2008

goodbye cpan-testers, hello cpan-uploads

Today, at 4:11pm Pacific Standard Time, an era (or at least 9 years) ended.  The cpan-testers mailing list, recipient of a all CPAN tests submitted for CPAN testers processing, no longer resends all of those emails to its 50+ subscribers.  The last message to be distributed via email should have been #1049514.  Further messages will be kept in the archive, http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.cpan.testers (also home to RSS and Atom feeds).  Eventually, we're going to transfer to a proper database backed system that doesn't use email at all.



Several people noted that they used cpan-testers to receive notification of new uploads to CPAN.  We've created the cpan-uploads mailing list to receive these notifications.     Archive/RSS/Atom is at http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.cpan.uploads.  You can subscribe by sending a note to cpan-uploads-subscribe at perl.org.



Sunday, February 10, 2008

No more email delivery of cpan-testers

Dear cpan-testers recipients,



  Effective Monday night, Feb 11th, 2008, after over a million test reports[1], we will no longer be supporting the delivery via email of cpan-testers test reports.  With an influx of over 3000 messages a  day, this was causing us to deliver almost 200,000 outbound messages, most of which nobody read.



cpan-testers test report submission is unaffected by this change.[2]


If you are currently subscribed to cpan-testers, you'll be unsubscribed, and your mail server will breathe a sign of relief.


  You can find test reports at:
    http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.cpan.testers/
    http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.cpan.testers/rss/posts.xml
    nntp://nntp.perl.org/perl.cpan.testers/
    http://testers.cpan.org/


Why are we doing this?  Things were chugging along smoothly, except every few weeks we'd have a problem where a recipient's mail server would stop accepting mail, and we'd very quickly end up with a large backlog of thousands of messages waiting to be delivered.  This would slow down delivery for all of our mailing lists.  Recently, this has been happening more and more often.  We analyzed the
problem, and came to the conclusion that the best solution was to discontinue outbound email.  This will let us focus more time on maintaining more important things.


If you have something that is dependent on receiving all of these emails, please let us know.


Thanks!


-R


Footnotes:
[1]  http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.cpan.testers/2008/01/msg1000000.html


[2]  There are some volunteers working on a new system that will take email out of the picture altogether, creating a faster, more streamlined, and more consistent test database.


Saturday, February 9, 2008

Email Glitch affecting pm.org and cpan.org

This past Thursday and Friday, we had an email glitch affecting cpan.org and pm.org email addresses.  The issue has been fixed, and mail is flowing normally once again.  If you sent a message to a cpan.org or pm.org address and it hasn't gone through, or if it bounced, you may wish to send it again.