[Mailman-Users] On Manageability

[Brad Knowles]

J.A. Terranson wrote:

> 	The listowner you are comparing notes with (and correctly 
> asserting to split the work to) is more likely to be someone like me, 
> playing the role of listowner for non-technical people who use mailman 
> like it was IRC.  Sadly, this is a not uncommon application for mailman, 
> and one where a few management tweaks would make this already fantastic 
> work even better.

Believe me, we get plenty of that on the non mailman-* mailing lists.  The 
only thing is that I don't have to deal with most of that stuff, because all 
those other lists have other listowners.

And I get plenty of this kind of stuff at ntp.org, too.  But at that site, 
I'm the primary listowner for all the lists on the system, and that's why it 
is so much more work for me than what I do for python.org.

This is a key reason behind my recommendation that you really need to get 
other people to help share the burden.

> 	The ability to flag certain users as being able to ignore certain 
> rules would be a godsend: you would remove many hours a month of listowner 
> work.  Yes, I realize that the current design of mailman doesnt lend 
> itself well to this idea, and I am not holding my breath (I would never go 
> back to a majordomo or listserv format again anyway - there's no 
> comparison!).

This is the first I'm hearing in this conversation as a request for more 
granularity in terms of what certain users are allowed to do.  More 
granularity with regards to what they can do when sending messages to the 
list is a perfectly reasonable request.

Up until now, this conversation has been about someone wanting to completely 
eliminate the -owners address for a list, so that they didn't have to deal 
with that aspect of the administrative overhead of managing the list.

These are two separate and distinct issues.  One is a reasonable request 
that we might be able to address in Mailman3, the other ... not so much, 
although I do recognize the pain from which the request is being made.

-- 
Brad Knowles
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