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

[Brad Knowles]

At 12:15 PM -0500 2006-01-01, R. Bernstein wrote:

>  ***If I have this correct, where GNU mailman seems to differ from say
>  sourceforge bug and feature trackers is that in GNU Mailman where
>  there is a password associated with a moderator and an administrator
>  *account*, in sourceforge tracker, there is a moderator or
>  administrator *flag* is associated with a account(s) to grant
>  access. So to moderate or administer an account one uses one's
>  selected user account and password. As a result, is easier to effect
>  such an enforcement described above.

	The current version of Mailman does not really properly support a 
database, which I think would be required for the kind of features 
you're talking about.  Yes, there are at least one or two database 
MemberAdaptors of one sort or another, but all they do is take the 
existing Mailman method of working and adapt that to be compatible 
with databases, whereas for the kinds of features you're talking 
about, the reverse would really be required.

	The next major version of Mailman (Mailman3) will be much more 
database-aware, and this would be an excellent idea to get onto their 
plate now.

>  Again at the risk of beating this horse dead, what we're looking for
>  is a way for mailing lists to distribute the burden of moderation such
>  as by having the mailing list be more self moderating as it appears
>  that the wiki works. (I could be wrong here about the wiki.)

	Check the recent news about WikiPedia.

	The lesson is that any project which grows sufficiently large, 
will have such issues if they are permissive in terms of what they 
allow their rank-and-file subscribers to do.

	I certainly occasionally hear about similar problems with the 
MoinMoin wiki on python.org, and it's not anywhere near as large as 
WikiPedia.

	On another site I help administer, we take a more restrictive 
approach with TWiki -- accounts are free and automatically given, but 
you at least have to sign up for an account before you are allowed to 
modify anything, and certain pages are locked down as to which 
administrative groups are allowed to modify them -- and I haven't 
heard of any such issues there.  On the other hand, we're also much 
smaller than the MoinMoin wiki on python.org, so it's hard to say 
what is a result of our tighter security measures and what is a 
result of our being a lot smaller.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad at stop.mail-abuse.org>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
     Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

  LOPSA member since December 2005.  See <http://www.lopsa.org/>.