Sorry I'm getting to this so late...
On 04/02/2015 03:48 PM, Andrew Stuart wrote:
What’s on your wishlist for the perfect Mailman web interface?
Well, the thing I find most frustrating about the current (2.X) Mailman web interface is the "Adminsitrative Database Results" page. I manage a bunch of moderated lists that get large numbers of messages a day, with varying ratios of junk (spam, off-topic-for-list, misdirected, unauthorized, etc.) vs. legitimate messages that should be approved. The current design is very space-inefficient for held messages, so I can only see three held messages (more precisely, the accumulated held messages for three senders) on the screen at once. If I'm scrolling through hundreds of messages like that, it's very very hard to keep my place, make sure I'm clicking on the correct line, and make sure I haven't missed any messages. (For high-volume lists, that means that "Discard all messages marked _Defer_" is too dangerous to use.)
Also, because messages appear in an unpredictable order, it's very hard to see patterns. I can see at a glance if I got three messages from a particular address, but I can't see at a glance if I got three messages with subjects starting "Curso-Taller" or "Urgent!" or from the same domain.
So what I would like would be a much more space-efficient summary page, with one or at most two lines per message, so I could get 20 or 30 messages in view at once, with sortable columns. Something like (mocked up in plain-text, and assume each message is on one line):
defer(_) accept(_) reject(_) discard(_) more[V] | admin@asesoriascreativ...[V] | Curso-Taller: Como hacer Presentaciones...[V]
defer(_) accept(_) reject(_) discard(_) more[V] | norelpy@example.ro[V] | Von Dr. Mark Smith[V]
defer(_) accept(_) reject(_) discard(_) more[V] | info@microsoft.com [V] | Vouz avez gagne le prix Microsoft $4,000,000[V]
where the things I've marked with [V] (that's supposed to be a down-arrow) are links that provide more information. (This actually seems to be a great place for JavaScript, which I normally hate; if JavaScript is disabled those links could all go to a page with more detailed information about the message, like the [1], [2], etc. links now, but if the user has JavaScript enabled they could just expand the table to insert the information below the current entry. Or maybe there's a way to do that with just CSS.)
The table would be sortable by column (and ideally, maybe by things that aren't columns, like the bare domain of the From: line, the message size, whether the message has attachments, and so on).
A related frustration is that the admindb page, and its single-message view, don't handle encoded data very usefully. That's obviously a very tricky thing, given that you can't trust the sender to have encoded headers or bodies validly, and especially in the case of attachments the senders are likely to be malicious. I don't know that I would want data decoded *by default*, but it would be nice to be *able* to decode headers and text attachments. (Similarly, for HTML-only messages, a textual summary of what the top of the message is going to look like would be useful, since now, the extract you can see is likely to be all stylesheet and formatting junk, even for legitimate messages from Windows users.) And if a header or body *fails* to decode, that's useful information too.
Currently, I'm mostly using the command-line "listadmin" tool, which happens to present an interface pretty similar to what I'm talking about, but I've wanted a much more compact moderation interface since long before I knew about listadmin.
I'd love to see the default admindb pages in MM3 be easier to manage.
Jay