mailman's mailing list archives at biopython.org/pipermail/...

[peterjc]

The single largest group of broken links reported via the Google webmaster tools, and also noted by @mmokrejs (see http://mailman.open-bio.org/pipermail/biopython-dev/2016-April/021345.html) are URLs like this:

http://www.biopython.org/pipermail/biopython/2011-January/006979.html

This page is still available via the primary OBF mailing list domain name:

http://lists.open-bio.org/pipermail/biopython/2011-January/006979.html

They are also available via this secondary alias:

http://mailman.open-bio.org/pipermail/biopython/2011-January/006979.html

Ideally we'd automatically redirect http://lists.open-bio.org/pipermail/* to http://lists.open-bio.org/pipermail/* which was easy under Apache, but becomes harder under GitHub Pages.

See also #19 and #32 for more general issues about broken links.

[peterjc]

We could easily add stub pages for:

• http://biopython.org/pipermail/
• http://biopython.org/pipermail/biopython/
• http://biopython.org/pipermail/biopython-dev/

Even adding the monthly overview pages would be quite easy. However, all the useful URLs pointing to these pages are to individual emails in the archives.

I think that the only way to fix all the links within GitHub Pages is literally to copy the mailman archives into a GitHub pages repository - perhaps another separate project one, i.e. branch gh-pages of https://github.com/biopython/pipermail in order to be visible as http://www.biopython.org/pipermail/aka http://biopython.org/pipermail/

This would have some advantages: It would be a nice backup, and we can put styling on top of the minimal mailman layout, and a one-off conversion/dump would fix all the existing URLs.

Potentially we could keep the GitHub mailman archive updated automatically - this would require a script running (ideally on the OBF mailman server which is possible as long as the load is minimal). Unfortunately that would create an unwelcome maintenance burden.

[peterjc]

I've redirected the related /mailman/ URLs with 07d9e88