[Mailman-Developers] message board functionality?

[Steven Hazel]

   "user option to not actually receive mail from lists"... for lists
   with archiving, you can already just go and read the archive.  I know
   a lot of people who do this on real lists.  You'd just have to change
   the link to say, "visit the list in forum format" or something like
   that. 

Well, I was thinking that it might be a good idea to have some sort of user
account system.  This is a functionality which might be objectionable in a
mailing list manager, but I'm not sure, since it would have some benefits
as well.  The idea is that rather than simply subscribing to a mailing list,
users would create an account -- complete with username and password -- with
Mailman.  Perhaps the accounts should be per-list or perhaps a single account
could subscribe to a set of lists.  The account would include information
about one or more addresses to which mail should be sent.  At that point, for
the ordinary mailing list user, everything is the same.  For users who want to
make exclusive use of the web interface, though, their username and password 
would be required at least to post under their username and maybe sometimes
for read access (for private lists).

One possibility this opens up is that posts could (optionally, of course)
be listed under usernames for those who want anonymity, or with usernames as
well as email addresses.  One nice thing about that is that if someone has
a subscription to a mailing list and switches email addresses, they can
just tell Mailman that the new address belongs to them, and posts from that
address could be recognized and given their username.  From there, things
like prefered email addresses for replies to posts regardless of the origin
of the post are possible, which would sometimes be nice.  I know I'd like
to be able to post to certain mailing lists from my work email account and
have replies uniformly show up at my regular email address.

I'm wondering what your take on user accounts will be.  It's important
functionality for a web-based forum, but seems sort of tangental to mailing
list management, though it does have some advantages.  Perhaps they should
be optional, or perhaps they don't belong in a mailing list manager at all
and should be handled in a wrapper of some sort.  My thought is that they
should be optional, and turning them on could also turn on a great deal of
web-based funtionality.

-Steven