[Mailman-Developers] message board functionality?

[Barry A. Warsaw]

>>>>> "SH" == Steven Hazel <cherub@azrael.dyn.cheapnet.net> writes:

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

I actually believe user accounts are essential, but perhaps that's
because of my unique relationship with the python.org lists.  I agree
with everything you've said.

The biggest problem that I have is remembering all the dang passwords,
both user and admin passwords, that I have to use every day.  So I
would go one step further; I would let the site administrator
designate which user accounts can have admin privileges for which
lists, so they'd only have to remember one password to administer any
list of theirs.

Users should also be able to manage all their lists on one screen.
Say they're going on vacation.  One button could allow them to disable 
all their accounts on the site, and another would enable them upon
their return.

It's interesting that user accounts are so important for message
boarding (a feature that I think would be cool to add to Mailman),
because I've been seriously considering this to better support
existing functionality.  The question in my mind is whether to
homebrew all this support, or to leverage off of Zope, which I think
already has much of this functionality.

-Barry