[Mailman-Developers] Inactivity deletion of maillist users ?

[Brad Knowles]

At 4:13 AM +0100 2006-01-13, Erling Hellenas wrote:

>  This is just an idea for an addition I think would be useful. I think that
>  normally if you create some piece of information with a computer you should
>  also see to that it is taken away when it is no longer needed.

	In some cases, that may be appropriate.  However, it is totally 
inappropriate to assume that this is correct in all cases.

>  As I see it everything will get much easier if you have only the active
>  users in your databases, instead of having many times that amount of
>  inactive people who don't even read the mails.

	For most mailing lists, 99.9999% of the subscribership is silent 
-- they read, but they never post.  In fact, many mailing lists are 
announcement-only -- subscribers are not allowed to post, even if 
they want to.

	On lists where subscribers are allowed to post, if you then force 
them to periodically respond to an automated query, you will find 
that many of them decide it's not worth the hassle and they will go 
somewhere else.


	You obviously feel that this feature is desirable for your 
purposes, and therefore you want the Mailman developers to add this 
functionality.  The problem is that Mailman is an open source project 
and the developers do not have the time to implement even a small 
fraction of the features they consider to be useful, much less the 
features that might benefit only a tiny fraction of the community.

	Mailman is an open-source project.  If you want to add code to 
the system to provide such a feature, or arrange for someone else to 
do that for you, then you would be welcome to have that code uploaded 
to the appropriate page on the SourceForge web site and the Mailman 
developers would consider whether or not to use that code (or create 
their own code) to add that feature at some point in time in the 
future.  Otherwise, I wouldn't hold your breath.


	I certainly doubt that anyone is going to give this idea any 
strong consideration so long as we're still talking about Mailman 2.x 
and Python pickles for list data and meta-data storage -- the 
additional data storage and operational performance costs would be 
too great for far too many lists.

	Maybe once we get into Mailman 3 (a.k.a., "MM3") and having a 
real back-end database, something like this might be somewhat more 
feasible -- although I doubt it would be any more attractive or 
broadly useful to the whole community.

-- 
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/>.