Drupal Release Notification System

Better call it Drupal announcement (announce@drupal).

It can have any announcement (e.g. conferences, releases, security, other events).

Personally, I'd prefer to keep the topics separate. If you're interested in conferences and events, join the event announcement list. If your interested in releases, join the releases list. If you're interested in security announcements, join the security list. If you're interested in all of them, then join all three! It's as simple as clicking a few boxes on your user profile page and saving it. This is how the security list and the newsletter list are handled now.

I have a strong preference for low-traffic and high-relevancy lists (like the security list), so when you get a message from that list you know that you should take the time to read it. If there's a bunch of other stuff coming in on the same channel, you're more likely to stop paying attention and miss something important. (A colleague of mine refers to this phenomenon as "fridge noise"; if the noise is always there, you stop hearing it.)

This being Drupal, everything is already hyper-categorized (or taxonomized) so it should be easy enough to sort one from the other. It'd be a shame not to take advantage of that for the mailing lists.

This has been discussed on the mailing list. The general consensus was to subscribe to RSS feeds of the front page / the "News and Announcements" forum.

-K

Actually, that was the consensus among the people who were happy reading the development mailing list. The person who made the original request disagreed, as do I.

The Front Page and the News and announcements feeds are not helpful to me because:
1. They're RSS feeds, not emails.
2. They both contain a bunch of irrelevant stuff (especially News and announcements).

The Security announcements list is VERY useful to me because;
1. It comes to me as an email.
2. Every message I get from that list is important.

It looks to me like every 'Security announcement' node gets sent out to everyone with that flag set on their user account. So, the infrastructure for this should already be there. If you add a 'Release announcement' tag to every release announcement, you can do the same thing.

If I'm wrong and it's difficult to do, then maybe it's not worth the trouble. If I'm right, and it's just a matter of changing the configuration, and putting the 'Release announcement' taxonomy on the announcements, then please do. You'll make more than a few people a little more satisfied with drupal.

As it seems to be important to state this explicitly, I'd be more than happy to do whatever work is required to make this happen. However, I simply don't have the access to do it. I'd greatly appreciate it if someone could point me in the right direction if there's some way for me to make this happen.

For example, if there's a staging site for drupal.org where I could test out the changes, access to that would probably be sufficient.

In the forum thread that prompted this issue, I mentioned what I'd personally like in such a release notification system. Mainly, notification of main Drupal releases, as well as new versions/updates to themes and modules.

If you want e-mails, it is trivial to convert an RSS feed to e-mail. There are several services that can send an e-mail when an RSS feed changes (Yahoo News I think has this feature?). If you're more the DIYer, there is also the UNIX program rss2email. Since there will be no discussion about announcements a mailing list is overkill.

Alright, let's call it a notification system, then. That was my intention in any case. Apparently, "mailing list" == "discussion list" for other people, so I apologize for confusing the issue.

While I'd prefer to get an e-mail, an RSS feed would also be acceptable, on the condition that the feed contain release announcements and only release announcements. As far as I've seen, such a feed does not exist.

hehe, funny you should ask.
see http://drupal.org/node/77562

Between the new feeds on d.o, update_status.module, and everything else, I think it's safe to say that Drupal has a pretty solid "Release notification system" now.