aaryan bhagat writes:
It is obvious that posts will not be deleted even if the user unsubscribed. But there is a "Discussion you have commented" section. It is linked with each user.
[Addressed to all students, not a personal criticism]
One should study the Mailman architecture closely, especially the database schema. It's unnecessary to know all details of each entity, but it's absolutely crucial that you understand the relationships among sites, domains, lists, roles, users, addresses, memberships, and subscriptions. (The last two are actually relationships, of course, but they are concrete entities == rows in the database.)
If somebody would like to make an entity-relationship diagram or a UML/SysML description, I'd be happy to ensure it gets into the documentation in an appropriate place!
For example, it's confusing to say "the user [Mailman entity] unsubscribed." It is accurate to say "the user [human] unsubscribed the address" or "the address [Mailman entity] unsubscribed" (of course, this is awkward English, normally we'd use a passive voice). Sorry about the overloaded words, but that's the way any language works, whether natural or for programming. We deliberately overload "user" in this way so you know that the Mailman entity represents a human.
Note that one cannot assume that the mentors grasp all of Mailman. Mailman is a huge project already. The advantages we have over you are (1) we know who to ask, (2) we know some parts well enough to say "I don't know where to find that", (3) we have more experience in finding stuff in general and in particular in Mailman. (NB "Mentors have more experience" is true in Mailman, at least to my knowledge, but there are 10-year-olds contributing to other projects in GSoC who are sad that it's limited to college students!)
[Specific to answering Aaryan]
If you are correct that this "Commented" section is linked with users, not addresses, that's your answer: it's linked with users, not addresses. Users don't get deleted just because all addresses are unsubscribed for all lists -- they might want to subscribe again, or to different lists. (Note that this would be horrible for academic users, who frequently destroy and reconstitute thousands of lists every year.)
Note that (IMO) if a user has an associated address that does not appear in this section, we're doing the database wrong. Users associate addresses so that Mailman will know about them, and they will expect anything they wrote under any of their addresses to appear here. (Note: GDPR "right to be forgotten" implications.)
If a user resubscribes will this section appear or it will start fresh?
I don't know, I'm not a HyperKitty expert. My guess is that this section is populated by a database query on author when the page is refreshed. Therefore it will appear, including all past posts, even if the address was not subscribed at the time of posting.
Regards, Steve
-- Associate Professor Division of Policy and Planning Science http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp/ Faculty of Systems and Information Email: turnbull@sk.tsukuba.ac.jp University of Tsukuba Tel: 029-853-5175 Tennodai 1-1-1, Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN