[Mailman-Developers] Approval system

[Jeb Bateman]

On Mon, Feb 05, 2001 at 03:55:12PM -0600, James Thompson wrote:
> I'm trying to hack e-mail based message approval into mailman (like
> majordomo's system)  I've managed to alter the system to include copies of
> the mail to be approved with the notice to the list admin.  I've also
> discovered that the Approved: header does work.

I was browsing the -users archives today, and found it mentioned
somewhere that Approve.py (or something) already appears to check for
an Approved: header, but it didn't work in testing.  I haven't checked
myself, but that might be the quickest way to work this out...

> Majordomo must be manipulating the headers of a message a bit.

Yeah, majordomo's approved line can be in the body, which may be easy,
but error prone toward revealing a password to the list, (IIRC).

A much more elegant solution would be for Mailman to simply include a
confirmation number (like subscribe confirmations) in the subject of
messages to be approved, and then the admin could simply reply to
approve them (since they're already kept in the ~/data directory
anyway -- Mailman doesn't need a clean copy).

> I'm willing and (hopefully :) able to work on email based approvals for
> mailman but really don't care to waste my time if others have a better
> solution in the works or have no interest in it.  

It's not a big enough problem for me to work on at the moment myself,
but good luck...  Eventually, I would like to see a general verfy
wrapper in Mailman like Listar has, which would make user passwords
optional, (since I don't think people want more passwords), and allows
admins to edit moderated postings, etc.

Also, by the way, does anyone know why Mailman uses TEXTAREA fields to
display postings in the approval interface?  You can't edit them, so
why not just wrap them in <pre> tags to read/approve?  (In fact, the
textarea fields create a false impression that they *are* editable...)

-jeb