[Mailman-Developers] Editing of messages at the admin page

[J C Lawrence]

On 24 Nov 2000 23:55:20 CET 
Ricardo Kustner <ricardo@rixhq.nu> wrote:

> Although I like this idea, I personally think it would be more
> friendly to add an extra comment field that will be added to the
> top or bottom of the message... something like "[ Administrators
> note: blah blah blah ]"... If you edit the content of a persons
> message nobody will know what exactly you editted which can lead
> to questionable situations...

While I have a minor history of editing user's submissions to the
list, in each case I've prefaced the resultant message with
something akin to:

  EdNote:  The following lightly edited for <insert reason>

eg: 

  http://www.kanga.nu/archives/MUD-Dev-L/2000Q4/msg00205.php

I like this practice for the reasons you state.  It is for similar
reasons that I preface messages posted via my archives with text
indicating both the source and invalidity of the From: address:

  http://www.kanga.nu/archives/IRead-L/2000Q4/msg00000.php

The problem with doing this automatically upon edits is handling
MIME in an end-user friendly fashion.  The intent of the added
header etc is partially substitute for an editorial note, and to
make up for those occassions where the moderator edits and then
fogets to annotate his changes.  I don't want to embed diffs of the
changes (which would remove the value of the edit in the case of
flammage or inappropriate content), but I feel the system should at
least flag the fact of the edit in some automatic fashion.  

This all said, the possibility of abuse is always present.  Mailman
can't prevent it, and I don't believe should be in the busines of
controlling content at that level (tehre are applications where its
unwelcome and unecessary).

-- 
J C Lawrence                                       claw@kanga.nu
---------(*)                        : http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/
--=| A man is as sane as he is dangerous to his environment |=--