On Sun, 17 Dec 2000 22:56:50 -0800 Chuq Von Rospach chuqui@plaidworks.com wrote:

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Okay, let's split this out. There are five levels and a pseudonymous sixth:

1. Site owner -- SysAdm for the host 2) Group owner -- Sets group defaults

If the group owner manages a virtual site , why not call it that?

Gecause groups are a logical construct and may be both larger and smaller than virtual domains. A group may consist of the lists assigned to a particular list owner, lists sharing a common topic, a virtual domain, or any other structure of divide you may care to consider.

If we want to get technical, you have the owner of the mailman instance (since a given machine can have multple ones), the owner of the virtual host (which may be the only user of the mailman, or may share it), the list owner, the list moderator, and the list user. I don't see any advantage to breaking it out into finer gradiations, or generalizing the functionality beyond that.

The idea of the above group concept is that groups could be used for virtual hosts, or any other grouping desired. It really doesn't matter.

Consider Python.Org:

All the python lists could share a group and therefore a set of common templates, CSS files etc for their own unique/shared configs. All the pythonic app lists could share another group, the SIG lists another group, etc.

In my case I'd group lists into those run by me, and those run by others (ie not "offocial representatives of Me (tm)".

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The Group owner runs, say, a vhost and defines the default for a class of lists as well as handling creation of lists within that class.

Vhosts are merely the simplest way of tagging the group concept so people can grab it and relate it to something they already know and understand.

Also UI and graphic definitions for the site, since each site is going to wrap a different (do I dare use the term? I dare) skin over mailman, and we need to make sure we support that properly.

Quite. This would be done at the group level.

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-- Write an arbitrary note that is then associated with a member such that any moderator for that list will see that note when presented with data concerning that member (eg a post held for moderation).

you know, you just wandered down something I've played with in the past but keep forgetting about (mostly, i want it while I'm dealing with a problem, but not enough to create it the rest of the time) -- the problem/case book. Needs to be list-specific for privacy reasons, but there needs to be a way for admins to track users and issues, and a generalized note-taking/history-keeping function attached to a user_ID and a list would be great for this. ("what do you mean you never start fights, last January, you...")

I've got some ideas there, mostly centered about tacking a CRM tool off the side, linked to the AccountID I discussed earlier. Entries in the CRM would be tagged with a ListID and would be flagged as public (can be viewed by other list moderators) or private to the ListID.

This would exist in parallel to Mailman per se, linked only by a tag that some module inserts into the Mailman genned HTML...

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There are of course exceptions:

I want to hand moderate all his posts from his work address because they auto-append legal cruft I want to delete.

He only posts from Yahoo when he's drunk -- unsubscribe that address.

I expect these situations rare enough I wonder if it's worth even considering in the design.

I had a tough time coming up with good examples. Okay, better:

"Hey moderator, yesterday was my last day at XXX and I forgot to unsubscribe. Sorry about that, but would you mind unsubscribing me? In the mean time I'm reading through my home address on the same account."

I'm trying to think the last time I might have used something like this, and I can't think of one. they're a nice addition, but I think it's solving a problem I'm not convinced shows up often enough to worry about.

Which? By email address or by account?

but the hotmail attack thing is an indication of just how complex and gnarly email is on the net these days, because there really isn't much of an easy way to stop something like that. Fortunately, it's fairly rare.

One of the programming lists I'm on just had someone take a hotmail account which they'd already subscribed to 20+ daily porn picture services, and set it to auto-forward to the list I'm on. Asides from the fact that there are some very able photoshop people out there who should have better things to do with their time, it was quite difficult finding the account to remove/block (it was an open posting list).

-- J C Lawrence claw@kanga.nu ---------(*) http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/ --=| A man is as sane as he is dangerous to his environment |=--