[Mailman-Developers] Fine grained subscription control, scaling, noise, relevancy, subscription rules, dynamic lists

[Barry Warsaw]

On Mar 20, 2015, at 09:53 AM, Andrew Stuart wrote:

>The systers have recognised this problem and their solution is Dynamic
>sublists

And we may have a GSoC on dlists.  I think Systers is pretty happy with dlist
functionality, but it'll be interesting to see how it works as a more general
feature.

Related, there is the Roundup tracker's nosy lists.

http://roundup.sourceforge.net/docs/design.html?highlight=nosy#nosy-lists

Nosy lists are one of my favorite features of Roundup, which the Python
project uses.  The one problem with it is knowing that the new tracker issues
are sent to a different mailing list, so until you subscribe to it, you may
not be seeing new issues you want to be nosied on.

I see dlists and nosy lists as being somewhat related, and I'm hoping that any
GSoC work that happens keeps an eye on commonalities that can be used later
(though I don't want require nosy support of any GSoC student).

The other thought I've always had is to basically deliver a Gmane like
experience with MM3.  Gmane is one of the best FLOSS resources out there, but
because it's an independent service, it doesn't always have the list mirror
you care about.  What if you could have a similar experience as soon as you
installed Mailman?  I don't know how prevalent NNTP clients are today; I know
my MUA of choice (Claws Mail) has excellent support for it.  So good in fact
that I've tended to disable my subscriptions to many mailing lists I care
about.  I keep the subscription active so I can post to the list, but I read
them almost exclusively through NNTP.

>Possibly a solution worth considering is fine-grained subscription control,
>in which there is a set of SEND and DONTSEND rules at a List default level
>and at a user level.
>
>SEND:
>Discussions where list member email address is in to/from/cc:
>Discussions where to/from/cc contains one or more of: sally at example.org, davina at example.org, *.example.com
>Discussions where subject contains keyword: hyperkitty
>Discussions where body contains keyword: hyperkitty
>
>DONTSEND:
>Discussions where list member email address is in to/from/cc:
>Discussions where to/from/cc contains one or more of: sally at example.org, davina at example.org
>Discussions where subject contains keyword: Java
>Discussions where body contains keyword: ruby

This is similar to MM2's topics system.  I'm not really sure how successful
topics are.  I tend to think they're too heavyweight to set up and use so most
people and list admins don't bother.

>The technical hurdle to making this work is that Mailman needs access to
>historical messages to make it work (i.e. integrating some level of aqrchive
>like functionality into the Mailman database). I suggest this this may not be
>as hard as it sounds and hey, we’ve got a database there anyway so why not
>use it?

Right.  MM3 core has a message store, and I've always thought of that as a
very low level raw historical record.  It will never be as feature-full as a
real archiver, but it could be used to record basic information such as
message-ids, threading headers, etc.

Needless to say, this is an area I think is quite interesting and important to
explore.

Cheers,
-Barry