[Mailman-Users] Merging List Administrator with List membership

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Syafril Hermansyah writes:

 > >> > And then when any list-administrator/moderators make approval (of held
 > >> > messages) or add/remove any member, there is mail notification to
 > >> > listname-owner/listname-moderators that message has been approved or new
 > >> > member has been added or membership has been removed by
 > >> > <address-of-one-list-administrator>, that way other list-administrators
 > >> > know that someone has been did the job, no further action required.

This is regularly requested, but I have a hard time understanding why
it's useful, unless you have really horrible connectivity to the list
admin pages.  All it's going to do is fill up people's mailboxes with
these messages, and everybody will get two messages per task instead
of one.  I think that the only reason this request keeps coming up is
that until it's implemented nobody will notice the practical problems
with it.

I administer about a dozen lists, and direct the "you have messages to
moderate" notices to the bitbucket.  I have a bookmark folder in
Firefox with a bookmark for each list's moderation queue.  When I'm
about to do admin work (two or three times a day), the first thing I
do is "Open All in Tabs", which usually takes 20-30 seconds.  The
password is in the bookmarks, which is a small security risk but I'm
not particularly worried about these lists.  Often I won't even wait,
but immediately turn to email or such.

When I'm ready to do moderation, I just run down the tabs, closing
each one when I'm done.  I used to keep all the tabs open and minimize
the window when done, but all too often I'd either forget to process a
list, or forget to refresh its page so that it looked like an empty
queue.  The "close when done, open all in tabs when ready to start
again" strategy works very well for me.

If you only have one list to moderate, but share it with others, then
clicking an icon or selecting the window from a menu, and hitting
refresh, is hardly more effort than dealing with an extra mail,
especially once it becomes part of the routine.

IMO YMMV, but really I think you should look at reorganizing the
existing workflow rather than adding to it.