git-mentoring Google group replacement?

Hi all,

For a few years we've had this git-mentoring@googlegroups.com list, with the intention to give new or aspiring contributors a lower-stress place to ask for guidance when they're just getting started in the project.

The list has very very low activity. I think we get a newbie asking for help once or twice a year, and they do get responses right away as far as I can see; but we much more often get spam, spam, and more spam. We also tend to get spurious content violation reporting - from bots I guess, or maybe trolls - and these lead to legitimate conversations being deleted from the archive. This happened a couple weeks ago and we lost all conversations but 2. There doesn't appear to be any way in Google Groups to appeal these decisions - the notification email that was sent to the list owners simply suggests that we...get a lawyer?[1] We had a similar takedown last year or so, and I tried to escalate using Google's internal ticketing for employees, and didn't get very far there either.

Because it's not possible for us to push back on these takedowns, I think it's time for us to seek an alternative and shut down the Google Groups list.

Dscho proposed shutting down the Google Groups and having people ask in the Discord chat instead. I think it's reasonable; we've had a few newbies asking for contribution advice there and they get answers just as quickly, and we get a bit more moderation control. Discord is still not scrapable by web crawlers (which is one thing that was appealing to us about a closed Google Group). It does require account creation to post, but of course we still have git@vger, which does not; this mentoring-specific channel/list is supposed to just be an alternative for the especially shy.

Thoughts? Alternate suggestions? I'd also be happy to host a list with some other service, but I don't have any personal experience on which services are good to use or not.

 - Emily

1: Here's a sample of the takedown message from Feb 16, 2025; because the content was down, the link helpfully does not point to any actual content. I have no idea which mail was actually taken down, because there's not a good way to translate from Groups URL to Message-Id as far as I can tell.

Hello emilyshaffer@google.com,

We're letting you know that we've permanently removed the content at https://groups.google.com/d/msg/git-mentoring/mPiraiIITXI/cdsNx2elAgAJ

Why did this happen?

An external report flagged the content for illegal content or policy violations. As a result, our legal content and policy standards team removed the content for the following reason: unwanted content.

Learn more

You can learn more about our content policies and enforcement at our help center.

What you can do next

You may have the option to pursue your claims in court. If you have legal questions or wish to examine legal options that may be available to you, you may want to consult with your own legal counsel.

Emily Shaffer <nasamuffin@google.com> writes:

I am perfectly fine to close the unusable list, and suggest folks to redirect to discord or other services. If the discord channel is already found to be useful by those new folks who have been helped there, that would be excellent, and then the question would become

 - what other avenues to ask for help, other than this list, are
   there that community members are willing to support by visiting
   there frequently and help out?  can we compile a list?  I am
   perfectly fine we start with a list with one entry in it.

 - where do we want to advertise such a list?
   Documentation/Contributing?  todo:MaintNotes (aka "A note from
   the Maintainer")?

 - how would we maintain such a list to keep it up-to-date?

Hi Emily,

On Fri, Feb 28, 2025 at 11:43 PM 'Emily Shaffer' via git-mentoring <git-mentoring@googlegroups.com> wrote:

I agree with shutting down the Google Groups and suggesting people ask on either Discord chat or the #git-devel IRC Channel or the Git mailing list.

Thanks.