[Mailman-Developers] moderation...

[Ron Jarrell]

At 03:56 PM 3/12/02 -0500, Barry A. Warsaw wrote:

>>>>>> "RJ" == Ron Jarrell <jarrell@vt.edu> writes:
>
>    RJ> You know, it just occured to me, that under the new model, I
>    RJ> can't figure out how to let my list admins do something they
>    RJ> used to be able to do...
>
>    RJ> I have a list that's normally unmoderated, posting by
>    RJ> subscriber only.  Every now and then things get too heated,
>    RJ> and the list owner steps in and flips the moderate switch
>    RJ> until people play nice again.  Under the new rules, to do
>    RJ> that, the only way I see for him to do that is to go in and
>    RJ> click "moderate" next to each of 300 names... Or he has to
>    RJ> call me and I try to whip up a little python proc to run under
>    RJ> withlist to flip everyone's bits...  Did I miss something?
>    RJ> (Yes, I followed the discussions, but this particular regular
>    RJ> even just didn't register at the time...)
>
>That's definitely not a use case that's come up yet <wink>, so no I
>don't think you've missed anything.

Oh good :-).

>Let's tease out what you really want...

Well, for the case of this list, and drawing on the experiences of another
list I'm on, but don't host, that has done this more than once:


>- Would you be happy with an emergency switch that applied to all
>  postings, from members and non-members alike, even if the
>  non-members are on the "accept these non-members" list?

I think that would suffice - in these cases it's usually a flame war
that's broken out, and the admin/moderator wants everything
to just *stop* temporarily, but generally not be lost.

>- Should anybody's postings be able to go through without being caught
>  by the emergency switch?

Well, it'd probably be nice if the addresses listed as admins/moderators
could still post.  Bonus points I suppose for that to be configurable,
but, jeez, if you can't trust the other moderators, your list is screwed.

>- Should there be a magic header that lets messages go through even
>  though the switch is pulled?  Urgent: headers?

I don't think so; otherwise anyone who's sussed the trick defeats
the purpose.

>- Once the emergency switch is pulled, what should happen to postings?
>  Should they just get held for approval?  Would it make any sense to
>  reject or discard them?  Should that even be configurable?

Base state would be "held for approval."  Then the admin can either
let them through later, or pick out eggregious ones to nuke before
letting things go.  Given the existing tools, it's simple enough to just
reject or discard them all from the admindb page if so desired.