[Mailman-Users] Several problems, including Membership Management page

[Listwrangler]

Hello again.

To refresh your memory, I am a volunteer with a non-profit organization who
serves as their IT expert. (Please don't laugh. I truly am the most
technoliterate person they have!) I administer several Mailman lists on
behalf of the organization. I am not a programmer and I have no access to
the machine running Mailman. The current installation is Mailman 1.0. I
have no idea what it's running on because it belongs to the ISP.

I was set to receive digested mail, but it's been hours and nothing has
come through, so I've switched to regular mode. So, if anybody has posted
to the list in response to my previous postings, I haven't seen it yet, not
having gotten a digest yet. Hopefully things will speed up now that I've
opted for regular mail.

Problem #1, which I posted earlier: Some user passwords are not working.

I spelunked the archives and found out that apparently the reason why some
of my users' passwords are failing is because they mix up and lower case
letters. According to the post I found in the archives the fix is to
upgrade to the latest version of Mailman. I  sent this information to my
ISP. The director of operations has informed me, "I am running the latest
version."

Can anybody tell me what the latest version of Mailman is? They are running
1.0, as far as I can tell.

As I said, I don't know anything about their Mailman installation. All I
got was a tersely worded 'Your new mailing list' message. This message
doesn't even tell me what kind of software it is or what version. It
doesn't identify who made the software, or how to reach them. It doesn't
say where to go for help learning more about the software. If it's supposed
to generate some sort of help file, or send me and URL to find online help,
it didn't. Bug or feature?


Problem #2, The Membership Management console crashes my computer.

Whenever I go to the Membership Management console in the admin web pages,
it loads, then freezes. Nothing works. Total screen freeze. I have to turn
off the machine and reboot. I've done this several times this evening and
I'm getting a little testy.

I don't have this problem with any of the other admin or info pages.
Needlesstosay, I don't have this problem when viewing non-Mailman web
pages. I have graphics turned off. (And I'm not turning them on;  99.9% of
graphics are content-free and just eat up bandwidth.) I have cookies set to
accept cookies that are sent back to self. Java is turned on. My browser is
Netscape 4.0 on a PowerMac 6100 running MacOs 7.5.3.

Side note to #2. It would be useful if there was a 'delete' button in the
management console so that I could unsubscribe half a dozen people just by
checking them off, then hitting submit. It is a royal pain in my
....neck.... to have to manually unsubscribe fifteen or twenty people one
by one via the web interface.

Strongly recommended side note to #2. It would be better still if there was
a place where I could dump a whole batch of subscribe/unsubscribe requests
and do them all at once, instead of having to cherry pick through the
thirty odd screens of my 1000+ user list. The thing I really REALLY like
about Majordomo is that I could simply email a slew of
subscribe/unsubscribes in one message and have done with it. No web
interface needed.

Soapbox time: It seems strange to me that Administrators are deprived of a
really efficient and effective way to administer email lists. It's just so
much faster to pop off an email than to wade through a web site to perform
administrivia like un/subs. Yes, when I don't know what a command does or
the syntax, then the web site is a great fall back that coaches me through
it. I found most (but not all) of the help files associated with the web
pages helpful. But now that I know, I just wanna do it, not read about it.
End soapbox.

I have some other questions and queries, but that seems like enough for one
email. As always, I'd appreciate pointers to sources of more information
where I can get help learning how to use and troubleshoot Mailman. (Right
now I'm feeling rather nostalgic for Majordomo.)

Thanks in advance for any help.

Listwrangler






Listwrangler
listwrangler at iximd.com

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