At 9:36 AM -0700 2004/05/05, Bill Moseley wrote:

I run a few lists where we have trollers and trouble makers. Unsubscribing or moderating them doesn't help because they re-subscribe with a new email address. Moderation of subscriptions and posts is not practical on some lists.

Even if you required approval for the subscriptions, they'd still 

find a way to get through. You have to moderate each and every post, at least for those subscribers who are causing problems.

These people just post to get a reaction out of other list members. The best solution is to have people ignore them, but that's hard on a list that is constantly changing. So, this mode would allow a way for the list owner to enforce people to ignore the posts.

They would notice that they're not getting a reaction and 

re-subscribe under another name. You can't stop them.

I realize that it's not a perfect solution -- these people can still re-subscribe with a new email address, but for many they may not realize that they are the only one seeing their own messages.

Sooner or later, they will.  I don't think that this is something 

that you can solve. If you can't moderate the list, or at least moderate the problem users (and maybe moderate all new subscribers by default), and you can't get these people to behave, you're screwed.

-- Brad Knowles, <brad.knowles@skynet.be>

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania.

SAGE member since 1995. See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.

On May 5, 2004, at 12:36 PM, Bill Moseley wrote:

I'd like a subscription mode where someone will receive all messages, but when they post their message is only delivered back to them.

I don't think this is really appropriate for Mailman as a whole, but it shouldn't be impossible for you to implement. How's your Python? If you're not too squeamish about poking around in there yourself, I think you should be able to go take a look at the code designed so people don't get their own posts, and do the opposite for people with another bit set. It's going to mess with your user records and such to have this extra setting, but if these people are becoming that much of a problem, it might be worth doing.

If you're not into poking around in Mailman, you could do this before the message makes it to Mailman -- set yourself up a script that, if the message comes from a given set of addresses, sends a message back that looks like it came from mailman (not that hard to forge) containing that message. Then don't bother to send the message on to mailman. This allows you to keep your solution separate from mailman so you won't have to remember to change code again and again when you upgrade (although if your list appearance changes, your "jerk" might notice the discrepancy... most people tune that sort of thing out though). If you're not up for programming this from scratch, you could probably adapt some "vacation" mail script for the purpose -- I'm sure a web search would turn up something appropriate.

Terri