London.pm is undergoing one of its periodic reorganisations. We’re in the process of moving our web site over to a new server and as part of that move, we’ve decided that we’ll move our mailing list infrastructure to a third party system. Both the main discussion list and the announcements list will be run on Sympa.

But that’s not all the lists we currently have. In particular, we had a London Perl Jobs list, which anyone could use to post details of Perl jobs in London. It’s been decided that this list is too much hassle to keep up. Apparently, it needs a pretty high level of work from moderators. So that list isn’t going to be migrated and it will quietly die.

I thought that was a bit of a shame. I think it’s a useful list. And, in particular, I think it would be easy for outsiders to misread the reasons for the closure – given the current discussions about the death of Perl. Perhaps the list was killed off because there are no longer any Perl jobs in London (you and I both know that’s not true, but not everyone is following the situation as closely as we are).

So I decided to do something about it. I just happened to have a useful-looking domain sitting around not doing very much, so I’ve set up a jobs mailing list over there. Feel free to subscribe if you’re interested in Perl jobs in London. And, more importantly, please encourage people who are looking for Perl programmers in London to post their jobs to jobs@londonperl.co.uk.

Currently, the list is configured like this:

• Archives are public
• By default, replies go to the poster rather than the list
• Posts are accepted from anyone
• All posts are moderated

I’ll be happy to reconsider any of those settings once the list has been running for a while. I’m also considering setting up an associated jobs discussion list, if people think that would be useful.

See you on the mailing list.

Update [December 2016]: This mailing list has been around for just under two years and in that time it has received about five legitimate jobs posts. On the other hand, it gets about a dozen spam messages every day.

The problem is, of course, that the list was never really publicised to the people who would have used it (either the people who are looking for jobs or the people who are looking to employ people). And I’m realistic enough to realise that I just don’t have the time to improve this situation.

So I’m going to close down the mailing list. I know how this can be interpreted so I want to make it completely clear that this isn’t because there are no Perl jobs left in London. There are plenty of Perl jobs in London – this list just wasn’t the right place to promote them.