On 24 Nov 2000 23:55:20 CET Ricardo Kustner ricardo@rixhq.nu wrote:
Although I like this idea, I personally think it would be more friendly to add an extra comment field that will be added to the top or bottom of the message... something like "[ Administrators note: blah blah blah ]"... If you edit the content of a persons message nobody will know what exactly you editted which can lead to questionable situations...
While I have a minor history of editing user's submissions to the list, in each case I've prefaced the resultant message with something akin to:
EdNote: The following lightly edited for <insert reason>
eg:
http://www.kanga.nu/archives/MUD-Dev-L/2000Q4/msg00205.php
I like this practice for the reasons you state. It is for similar reasons that I preface messages posted via my archives with text indicating both the source and invalidity of the From: address:
http://www.kanga.nu/archives/IRead-L/2000Q4/msg00000.php
The problem with doing this automatically upon edits is handling MIME in an end-user friendly fashion. The intent of the added header etc is partially substitute for an editorial note, and to make up for those occassions where the moderator edits and then fogets to annotate his changes. I don't want to embed diffs of the changes (which would remove the value of the edit in the case of flammage or inappropriate content), but I feel the system should at least flag the fact of the edit in some automatic fashion.
This all said, the possibility of abuse is always present. Mailman can't prevent it, and I don't believe should be in the busines of controlling content at that level (tehre are applications where its unwelcome and unecessary).
-- J C Lawrence claw@kanga.nu ---------(*) : http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/ --=| A man is as sane as he is dangerous to his environment |=--