[Mailman-Users] Feature Request: Selective Mass Subscription

[Savoy, Jim]

   I guess we might be considered a fascist regime, but mass-subscribe
is an invauable tool here at our university. Hardly any of our lists are
opt-in (what a nightmare that would be for us - we need our lists up
and populated on exact dates and ready to roll). We have class lists,
lab lists, club lists, team lists, student lists, employee lists,
security lists (some of which contain every soul on our campus - rarely
ever used (never used yet, in fact, knock wood) for Virginia Tech-type
campus-wide emergencies, etc).

   Many of the lists are automatically populated by cron on certain
dates.
There is very little involvement really, and all of the email addresses
used
to populate these lists are from our own domains. Sure we have the odd
cranky
professor or student who wants off, and we comply by setting their
no-mail
flag for them (unless it's the security list - they have no opt-out
option
on that one (and a few others) and that is written into their contract
when
they aquire an account from us).

   But in all these years, we've had very few complaints and everything
has run
very smoothly. We usually comply quickly if someone wants out, but we
would
never in a million years want people to have to opt-in! That would truly
be
a disaster (confused users, thousands of phone calls and help queries,
and
worst of all, porously-populated, inconsistent lists, with no guarantees
that
the right students got critical class/lab-related messages, etc). This
invisible
behind-the-scenes subscription method is the way to go for us. None of
our
Mailman subscribers even know they have their own list passwords, and we
don't want them to! (I'd say about .01% are clever/curious enough to
figure
it out - I'm not implying that they are dopes, but rather they are just
overwhelmed by the hundreds of new things they have to learn coming to a
university - we don't want to pile on with even more stuff they need to
know).

I think that by running the server ourselves (and using only addresses
from our
domains) warrants this admittedly fascist attitude. Perhaps the safest
way to
handle this (in future releases) is to make mass-subscribe=NO the
default setting
for new installs, but not removing the option altogether. Thanks.

 - jim -

PS I am pretty sure that this discussion only involves removing
mass-subscribe
   from the GUI (and not the command line) but many of our lists require
mass-
   subscribes on certain dates from the GUI as well (usually conducted
by the
   departmental secretaries).