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

[JC Dill]

R. Bernstein wrote:

> I guess sometimes things are not what they may seem initally, so many
> thanks for the detailed explanation; it all makes sense. It is also
> interesting to learn that the GNU mailman mailing lists have the same
> problems as other GNU lists. But it sounds like the GNU mailman lists
> have very dedicated moderators.

<blush>

I don't write code - my role in projects is as a product manager. 
Helping administer/moderate the mailman lists is one of the ways I can 
help "contribute" to mailman.

> 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.) 

There are a lot of differences between editing a wiki and moderating a 
list.  Most people edit a wiki by adding content in areas where they 
have knowledge.  Sometimes this contribution is prodded by going to the 
wiki to *get* the information and discovering that it's not there, and 
realizing that they are well suited for putting it there.  There's also 
immediate positive reinforcement, their words are now on the web for all 
to see.  When they need to refer someone to the content they can say "go 
to the wiki" and their words will be there for the other person to refer 
to.  So they get value (something they made is "there" and can be used 
later) and recognition from this activity, and that positively 
reinforces their efforts and encourages them to do more of it.

The process of digging thru spam to find on-topic posts that should go 
to a mailing list is not nearly so rewarding.  (The term "Thankless 
task" comes to mind.)  Without receiving reminders that there are posts 
waiting for moderation, there is no event to nudge moderators to go 
moderate.  Once they have moderated the posts, there is no recognition 
that they discarded all that spam, that they were the ones who "freed" 
the held posts for delivery on to the list.  I don't think you will get 
a lot of participation from a wide range of your list membership.  I 
think that you will find that a very small number of your list members 
regularly do the moderation duties and that occasional moderation by 
other list members is very very rare.

Another option for the solution I proposed is to just give out the 
moderator's username and password in the footer of the main list, in 
addition to having a moderators list.  Now a would-be moderator has 2 
different ways they can participate - they can just randomly log in from 
time to time to see if there is anything that needs moderating, or they 
can subscribe to the moderator's list to receive notices when there are 
posts that need moderating.  You still don't have any way to track who 
moderated the post, but you would make participation easier because they 
don't have to subscribe to the moderator's list to get the username and 
password.

In your original proposal you suggested a box or flag that allows anyone 
who is a subscriber to the list to moderate the list, which provides the 
individual activity tracking.  If we were to add this, I think that this 
should be a *member* setting (mod-access) rather than a *list* setting, 
and then it can be added to the new member config options.  A list owner 
could then configure the list to have new members automatically included 
in the people who can moderate the list, and the mod-access flag can be 
turned off (or back on) member by member for existing members.

> The observation is that right now, a number of mailing lists at least GNU
> mailing lists are just getting neglected, and this suggests something
> is wrong. Maybe it's just a global misunderstanding of how to set up a
> general help list (e.g. a documentation change), but I have a feeling
> it's not just that.

Moderating a mailing list is a different type of activity than 
contributing code.  For best results you need to enlist, encourage, and 
reward (with recognition from the list owners or key developers) the 
people who do this work, even if you do all the reward and encouragement 
in private email to your helpers.  This goes a long way towards keeping 
them happy.  I do this work on the mailman lists as a service to the 
mailman community, but when Barry says "thanks" that's a real motivator 
for me to continue.  I'm pretty sure Brad feels similarly.

> I don't know how to or have a suggestion as to how to deal with
> concerns of the getting discussions to the right user/developer group
> or what should be indicated when making a feature request. However I
> do see the wisdom in discussing things in the right venue. After all,
> what's important is getting ideas and solving this problem, not
> bothering or using up the bandwidth of the wrong people. So if this
> discussion should be moved to the user list, please let me know.

The -dev list is fairly quiet right now, so it's not a bad thing to have 
this discussion here.  You might want to post on -users as well, you 
will reach more people, different people, and get some additional 
perspectives on your problem and possible solutions.  -users is a better 
place to drum up support for the feature request - if we get many other 
list owners who say "hey, we could use this on our lists too" then that 
helps move the feature request priority up and encourages a developer to 
consider writing the code.

jc