[meta-sig] Re: [meta-sig] RE: [meta-sig] [Fwd: Re: [META-SIG] Switchover to mailman]

[Ken Manheimer]

On Thu, 26 Feb 1998, Barry A. Warsaw wrote:

> >>>>> "GMF" == Geoffrey M Furnish <furnish@xdiv.lanl.gov> writes:
> 
>     GMF> I think subscribership info should be publicly viewable by
>     GMF> default. If specific individuals wish to hide their address
>     GMF> from visibility, I would not deny them that privilege.  Kind
>     GMF> of like phone #'s in the phone book.
> 
> There should be several options along the line of private, anonymously 
> subscribed to fully public.  Users should have an option of having
> only their name (and not email) displayed, both their name and email,
> or neither displayed.  Of course private members still need to be able 
> to edit their personal records.

Mailman actually does offer one alternative option which may be of
interest.  Lists can be set to reveal the subscribers addresses only to
other subscribers.  The probem here is that they become accessible
via only the 'who' email commands - the web interface doesn't seem
to offer an option for this.  

> Maybe that hints to a structure where Mailman maintains a database of
> member information.  It would be cool if this could be collated such
> that if I wanted to change my contact email address, or password, I'd

Of course, mailman does maintain records associating list member email
address with their option settings.  It would be easy to add an option
which records a name and URL for users, and a bit more work to register
that URL instead of their email address for the publically visible link. 
One thing that could be a problem here is that, if it becomes common
practice, we might start to see opportunists subscribing just to
establish public links to "advertise" offensive or illegal sites, like
"warez" folk use anonymous download sites to share illegal copies.  I
don't think we can police such a thing, which makes me reluctant to
concentrate on it.

> only have to change this once, not for every list I'm on.  I'd also be 

This starts to get complicated - the system would probably have to
provide mechanisms whereby a user could customize their subscriptions to
one list different than their subscriptions to another.  Worth talking
about on mailman-developers.

> This is all very cool.  I hope Ken can get the mailman-developers list 
> up and running soon.  It would be a nice experiment of the
> bizarre^H^H^H^H^H^Hazaar concept of software development.  I'm sure
> this could make serious inroads in the Majordomo world.

yep yep yep.

Ken