public and private messages in the same archive?
How can I make some messages in a Mailman list archive public, and others private? or what is the closest I can get to this behaviour?
I'm setting up mailman at my housing coop, http://campcoop.com/
We're a small group and historically we've no tradition of online communication - so I wanna keep any friction or overhead to a minimum
There are many benefits to working in the open and having public list archives - I'd like to encourage this
- but there are some messages which, for good reason, members don't want publicly archived
To minimize friction, I don't want to confuse members with membership in two mailing lists: one with public archives and one with private archives
Is there any way to make some messages public and others private, in the same list archive?
It's OK for all messages' subjects to be public in the archive index, so long as following the link to view private messages requires a password
One thought was to make <list-name>-private@campcoop.com an alias of <list-name>@campcoop.com, then have a cron job periodically crawl the archive and regenerate .htaccess files to require passwords to access any messages sent to <list-name>-private@campcoop.com
Jack Bates wrote:
Is there any way to make some messages public and others private, in the same list archive?
It's OK for all messages' subjects to be public in the archive index, so long as following the link to view private messages requires a password
One thought was to make <list-name>-private@campcoop.com an alias of <list-name>@campcoop.com, then have a cron job periodically crawl the archive and regenerate .htaccess files to require passwords to access any messages sent to <list-name>-private@campcoop.com
You can't do it with .htaccess files because you will have both 'public' and 'private' messages in the same directory and the .htaccess file will apply to all of them.
The only way I can think of to do this is to make the archive private and modify Mailman/Cgi/private.py to not require authentication to see the indices for this list or to serve those messages which it somehow identifies as 'public' (or make a separate CGI to do this).
I suppose another way would be to have a public archive, but remove the world read permission from the private message's html files. This would be cumbersome though because one would access the archive via the 'pipermail' URL and then get a '402 Forbidden' when attempting to access a private message, and then one would have to use the 'private' URL to access a private message. If I were a list member in this case, I would just always use the 'private' URL and avoid the issue.
You could probably do the permission removal with something based on the template in the FAQ at <http://wiki.list.org/x/RAKJ>.
Do you really think in practice that it will be important to allow non-list-members access to the archive?
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
participants (2)
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Jack Bates -
Mark Sapiro