[Mailman-Developers] On allowing any list member to be an email moderator

[JC Dill]

Brad Knowles wrote:

> 	But there's a problem with multiple moderators, one that we have 
> on the mailman-users and mailman-developers lists ourselves -- in 
> addition to many other lists hosted on python.org.  In short, the 
> problem is getting all the moderators to follow the same moderation 
> policy.
> 
> 	Even if you have agreed on a moderation policy, there is still a 
> certain amount of judgement required, and Barry might feel one way 
> regarding a given post, JC might feel a different way, and I might be 
> somewhere on the fence -- or any other combination of the various 
> people involved.

That's a very interesting and accurate observation.  In fact, the 
moderated post that started this thread is one that I don't think I 
would have approved for posting to this list!  I felt mildly (but not 
strongly) that this was a discussion that should probably take place on 
-users first, because it's a discussion about the possibility of 
changing the way the mailman list is used (by it's users) rather than a 
discussion about "developing" a new feature, per se.  But, it's not 
totally off-topic for -dev so Brad is also "correct" for approving it.


The main problem I think Rocky is experiencing is the problem of absent 
moderators, period.  Rather than some automated method of turning the 
moderator tasks over to others, I suggest that a better way is to more 
closely oversee pending moderator tasks so that the list owner and the 
list server administrator receive notices when a moderator's queue has 
not been recently attended to, and address the lack of moderation while 
the queue is still small and relatively fresh.

To this end, I suggest a list server setting and a per-list setting for 
sending email notices (to the list server admin and to the list owner, 
respectively) daily, listing the number and type of stale moderation 
requests for each list.   My suggestion is that the default state of 
this setting be set to "on" and it can be toggled off as desired, and 
that the default is to start sending these emails once daily when there 
are pending moderator items in the queue that are older than 3 days (72 
hours).  List server admins and list owners could then adjust these 
settings based on their list traffic etc.

It might also be useful to provide a cc field for the list-owner setting 
so that when the owner is going to be absent from list management duties 
this message (and all other messages that go to the list owner) could be 
sent to a co-owner, and to allow the owner address to be set to nomail 
when there's a co-owner address entered.

jc