[Mailman-Developers] batch editing of users' topic subscriptions (feature request)

[Benjamin Rahn]

Hi Mailman devs,

As a list admin I would find it hugely helpful if I could batch-edit  
users' topic subscriptions.

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Context

I use mailman to administer mailing lists for a 400-member community  
of a college dorm (including students and staff).  Many of the  
announcements aren't applicable to the entire community, but instead  
to particular subgroups (e.g. sophomores, students living on the  
third floor, students enrolled in a math class).

Our current approach is to set up multiple lists -- one main list to  
which everyone is subscribed ('announce') and then another list for  
each subgroup (e.g. 'announce-sophomores', 'announce-third-floor',  
'announce-math').  This is, of course, inelegant at best and more  
typically a major hassle for all involved.

I'd like to be able to use topics to filter messages to the  
appropriate set of users, but as far as I can tell this would require  
adjusting each user's topics by hand.  (It's not realistic to ask  
members to set up their own topic subscriptions.)   If there was a  
batch mechanism for adjusting users' topic subscriptions this would  
be much easier.

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Potential Solution

I'm not particularly fussy about how the batch editing would be  
accomplished, but here's what I came up with that would seem to  
require little modification of mailman's current interface (I'm using  
2.1.9):

On the mass-subscribe page (mailman/admin/foo/members/add), permit  
input to the 'subscribees' textarea with lines of the form

   'address at domain.com topic1 topic2'

which would subscribe the address to the list if it wasn't already,  
and further subscribe the address to the listed topics.

Similarly, the mass unsubscribe page (mailman/admin/foo/members/ 
remove), this input would unsubscribe the address from _only_ the  
listed topics, but not from the list as a whole.

=========

Would love to get others' thoughts on this feature.

Thanks for your consideration!

Best regards,
Ben

PS I'm new to the list -- apologies if this has been covered before  
and my archive search wasn't sufficiently thorough.