[Mailman-Developers] confirmations/approval of subscriptions

[Scott]

On Sat, Oct 10, 1998 at 10:59:36AM -0700, John Viega wrote:
| On Sat, Oct 10, 1998 at 01:47:16PM -0400, Scott wrote:

| > 1) KISS - web based subscription and email based subscription should
| > act identical to each other -- meaning that there would be only one
| > set of configuration options for the admin instead of two.
| 
| That's probably fine...

I hope so, it'd be a lot easier to code.

| > 
| > 2) all subscriptions that don't need to undergo administrative approval
| > should go through the confirmation step.  Supscriptions that do need
| > administrative approval should not need to go through a confirmation
| > step. 
| > 
| > If people (other than malicious users ;) want for some reason to have
| > the option of completely open subscription (without confirmation or
| > admin approval), then there should be a site configuration variable
| > that determines whether or not completely open subscriptions can take
| > place.
| > 
| > the purpose behind this last idea is to allow site admins to
| > completely disable the possibility of mass subscribes without the
| > consent of the subscriber (this happens quite frequently at a
| > majordomo site i administor).
| > 
| 
| I agree with you, however, I know that some people think the confirm
| step is an extreme inconvenience, and for pretty tiny lists, generally
| they are right.  So I don't want to see it impossible to get rid of
| the confirmation step.  

OK, then should i go ahead with the site config option for this? and
have the confirmation step disabled for subscriptions requiring
admin's approval?

| BTW, Another thing some users have suggested to me is a web-based form
| where they can type in their confirmation number.  It'd be better to
| point to a URL than to say, "send mail to xxx", because there tend to
| be a lot of misfires to the mailing list proper.  I don't see why so
| many people can't follow the instruction that says, "you can just
| reply to this message", but hey...

this would be pretty easy to do.


| Another consideration is that sometimes the admin has a good reason
| for mass-subscribing people.  For example, I have a lot of friends in
| bands, and they collect email addresses at shows for their
| announcement lists.  Some of them don't even want people to be hassled
| with a welcome message, because the more mail some people get, the
| less happy they are about hearing from your band.  So another thing
| I'd like to keep around is giving the admin the ability to subsribe
| people, with or without sending the people welcome messages.

I just checked in a change to make admin cgi mass subscriptions repond
to the send_welcome_msg variable.  that  should address this if i'm
understnding you correctly.

scott