[Mailman-Developers] Hi! I'll be your intern for the summer :)

[Ian Eiloart]

--On 21 June 2006 23:45:49 +0100 Matthew Newton <mcn4 at leicester.ac.uk> 
wrote:

> On Wed, Jun 21, 2006 at 01:37:36PM -0400, emf wrote:
>> > How about this for extra:
>> >
>> > 1) Display a list of ALL members - just their names and addresses.
>> > 2) Delete ALL the list members with one click - OK, and maybe a
>> > confirm  dialog!
>
>> Perhaps something that might be more appropriate would be a "member
>> differ", wherein you upload a list of email addresses, and it shows you
>> the list of emails that were on the list but aren't now, and those that
>> would be added, and gives you the option to either accept all the
>> changes or selectively modify them.
>
> This sounds like the command-line "sync_members" program. I've
> been meaning to add a web interface to that for a while, but
> haven't managed to get around to it.

Yes, that's exactly it. In fact, I use sync_members to sync some student 
and staff lists with our personnel database. However, there are some lists 
that need to be synced occasionally with - for example - excel spreadsheets 
that belong to people without access to our servers.

> I guess it depends on what you use Mailman for. In then general
> internet-user-subscribes-themselves-mailing-list it's great. For a
> University with central management of some lists, it isn't quite
> what is needed all the time.
>
> One thing that happens each year here for some lists is that all
> list members of "course-year2" get moved to "course-year3",
> "course-year1" to "course-year2", and new members added to
> "course-year1". I can do this easily from the command line with a
> "list_members | sync_members", but I'd really prefer the owners to
> be able to do it themselves.

Another way of managing that is to name the lists after the year that the 
student enrolled. For example course-2004, course-2005. That way you only 
need to handle the occasional student who suspends studies for a year, or 
something. If you like, you can create aliases (in your MTA config) like 
course-year1 for the list names and just move the pointers at the relevant 
time.

> Which reminds me, another thing I've been wanting to add is
> "download members as text file" (basically the same as 1 above),
> which would go together with the sync_members option.
>
> Matthew



-- 
Ian Eiloart
IT Services, University of Sussex