[Mailman-Developers] Moderated-edit

Mike Holderness mch at cix.compulink.co.uk
Fri May 2 22:48:00 EDT 2003


Barry Warsaw <barry at python.org> wrote, inter alia:

> > 2) Moderated-edit. I'm running Mailman on a couple of boxes but I 
> 
> There is kludgey support for this now, that most people are probably not
> aware of: in the admindb interface, you forward the message to yourself.
> Then you use whatever tools you want to edit the message and resend it
> back to the list with the Approved header.  Then you delete the message
> from the admindb.  Not exactly the most efficient workflow. ;)

Ah, that's it. And what is the Approved header like?  Can't find it in the 
www.lists.org documentation. Currently waiting to see whether 
  List-Approved: <a moderator address>
works.

Well, it wasn't a *bad* guess... but it was wrong, in 
that the message still came up requiring moderation.
 
> The thing that's always held me back here is designing a useable u/i to
> such a feature.  Actually doing the editing probably isn't difficult,
> but I'm far from a web u/i expert.  Doing it in a way that won't get
> clobbered by huge messages, be vulnerable to cross-site scripting or
> other security issues, and that provides a natural editing interface, is
> a big task.  I wish there was some free tool we could just bolt on to do
> this -- I'm wondering if something like SquirrelMail could be
> appropriated for the task?

Wouldn't it be enough to offer editing in the standard TEXTAREA,
having first checked that the message isn't stupidly large? 

Then users who sent stupidly large messages that needed 
editing, or non-plain-text attachments that needed 
editing, would simply get them bounced. And then they 
might get to grasp the virtues of plain text and brevity.
Which would be a Good Thing. 

(List I moderate have a max message size of 10k and no
attachments. More than that is too much to be skimming.)

I've briefly tried and failed to think of an exploit
that works in a TEXTAREA. Someone will be along in a 
moment to correct me. 

Mike




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