Hi Mailman devs,

As a list admin I would find it hugely helpful if I could batch-edit
users' topic subscriptions.

======== Context

I use mailman to administer mailing lists for a 400-member community
of a college dorm (including students and staff). Many of the
announcements aren't applicable to the entire community, but instead
to particular subgroups (e.g. sophomores, students living on the
third floor, students enrolled in a math class).

Our current approach is to set up multiple lists -- one main list to
which everyone is subscribed ('announce') and then another list for
each subgroup (e.g. 'announce-sophomores', 'announce-third-floor',
'announce-math'). This is, of course, inelegant at best and more
typically a major hassle for all involved.

I'd like to be able to use topics to filter messages to the
appropriate set of users, but as far as I can tell this would require
adjusting each user's topics by hand. (It's not realistic to ask
members to set up their own topic subscriptions.) If there was a
batch mechanism for adjusting users' topic subscriptions this would
be much easier.

======== Potential Solution

I'm not particularly fussy about how the batch editing would be
accomplished, but here's what I came up with that would seem to
require little modification of mailman's current interface (I'm using
2.1.9):

On the mass-subscribe page (mailman/admin/foo/members/add), permit
input to the 'subscribees' textarea with lines of the form

'address@domain.com topic1 topic2'

which would subscribe the address to the list if it wasn't already,
and further subscribe the address to the listed topics.

Similarly, the mass unsubscribe page (mailman/admin/foo/members/ remove), this input would unsubscribe the address from _only_ the
listed topics, but not from the list as a whole.

=========

Would love to get others' thoughts on this feature.

Thanks for your consideration!

Best regards, Ben

PS I'm new to the list -- apologies if this has been covered before
and my archive search wasn't sufficiently thorough.