Ordering of messages in the moderation queue by date?
I run a heavy traffic list where all messages are moderated, and conversations are long. I typically would prefer to see the queue of messages awaiting moderation in time order, not alphabetically by email address as happens by default.
I presume this is not possible in the existing code, but how hard would it be to fix?
-- Perry E. Metzger perry@piermont.com
On 06/15/2013 08:09 AM, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
I don't think it would be too difficult. I have some thoughts on how to do it. I'll post a follow up later when I have time to flesh it out.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
On 06/16/2013 08:48 AM, Mark Sapiro wrote:
Attached is a preliminary patch to Mailman/Cgi/admindb.py.
The patch includes a hard coded setting
SUMMARY = 1
which presents the held messages summary in time order. Setting
SUMMARY = 0
produces the current grouping by sender in sender sequence with the additional guarantee that each sender's messages are listed in time sequence within that sender's box.
My initial thought is that this will be a list setting, although it could just be a button on the summary page to reorder the display, but then there probably should be a 'default order' choice somewhere.
I didn't do group by sender but present the groups in time sequence. If there is a large outcry for this, I'll consider it, but it leads to option overload, i.e sorted by senders oldest or most recent.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
On 06/19/2013 03:02 PM, Mark Sapiro wrote:
Attached is a preliminary patch to Mailman/Cgi/admindb.py.
Sorry, the patch was removed by content filtering. It should make it this time.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
On 06/19/2013 04:56 PM, Mark Sapiro wrote:
It would have been better if I hadn't posted that one. It had some bugs.
This one is a bit more thoroughly tested. It also has a set of radio buttons to select the sequence which can be 'grouped and sorted by sender', 'grouped by sender and sorted by time' or 'ungrouped and sorted by time'.
Feedback on this would be appreciated.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
On 06/20/2013 02:57 PM, Mark Sapiro wrote:
I noticed an issue that could have thrown an exception in some "shouldn't happen" case. Here's a corrected patch.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
Just for information, I have installed the patch for message ordering in the admindb held message summary in the Bazaar branch at <https://code.launchpad.net/~mailman-coders/mailman/2.2> (lp:mailman/2.2).
This branch is essentially the 2.1 branch with the addition of a few features and bug fixes as described under 2.2.0a0 in its NEWS file. The original goals for the 2.2 branch have been superceded by Mailman 3, and at this point, the intent is that it will never be released. It is however, tested and stable and is the basis of the Mailman I run on my production server. Most, if not all the differences between this branch and the 2.1 branch have not been backported to 2.1 for i18n reasons.
Note however that the fact that I run it in production doesn't necessarily mean that the held message ordering is heavily tested as I seldom see more than one held message at a time on my lists.
Anyway, if you are interested in this message ordering feature and possibly others, look at the 2.2.0a0 section at <http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~mailman-coders/mailman/2.2/view/head:/NEWS>, and consider using this branch.
Caveat: Topics regexps are handled differently (more in agreement with documentation) in this branch than they are in 2.1. If you use Topics and install this branch, your Topics regexps will be converted, but if you go back to 2.1, they won't be converted back, so it would be a good idea to use bin/config_list before installing 2.2 to back up any topics settings so they can be restored if you go back to 2.1. Also, because of the way Mailman detects the need for updates, if you YoYo back and forth, Topics regexps will only be converted the first time, so consider also backing up the 2.2 settings.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
Deal all, > I typically would prefer to see the queue of messages awaiting
moderation in time order, not alphabetically by email address as happens by default.
I totally second that notion. I have been thinking about this several times before, too. Would indeed be a very useful addition.
Jan
On 06/17/2013 01:58 AM, Jan Lausch wrote:
OK. Since this may be more widely used, here's a question? The current summary groups all the messages from a single sender into one 'box'. If we sort the boxes[1] by time, should multiple messages from a single address be in separate, time sorted boxes or should they still be grouped in a single box, and if the latter should the boxes be time sorted by oldest or newest in the box.
[1] A proper feature would redesign the boxes, but I'm not going there, and I'm not going to think about checking in the multiple box case for conflicting checkbox options applied to the same sender.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
Dear Mark,
should multiple messages from a single address be in separate, time sorted boxes [...]
Just my 2ct: keep it simple, no need to have many config options here: Just keep the "one box per sender"-idea, but sort the boxes by the time of the latest email from that sender.
And thus replace the old sorting order: "alphabetical" doesn't have any practical advantage (= someone missing the way it worked yet) in my eyes.
Use case "time-sorted" e.g.: find this one mail the user just sent a minute ago in a queue full of SPAM.
jan
Richard Damon writes:
I will say that for a list I run, I find the alphabetical ordering useful.
Indeed. Ordering will be an option, and since this request is hardly a FAQ (though I think it a pretty obviously worthwhile feature), I suppose that the default will be the traditional alphabetical ordering.
My 2 cents for Mark Sapiro's question:
The original post spoke of a list "where all messages are moderated, and conversations are long." A moderator who is trying to track the progress of a long conversation (while perhaps moderating for civility) would probably want to see all messages in strict time order, oldest first, without grouping by author. I would want it that way on my lists if they had enough traffic to make manual sorting tedious.
This could be especially important in cases where writers are sending off-list copies to each other, and thus sometimes replying to posts that haven't even reached the list in moderated form yet. You don't want to make a moderation decision about a reply before deciding what to do about the post being replied to.
(And of course "time order" must handle time zones accurately, e.g. a message sent from London at 1:00 am Wednesday should precede one sent from New York at 10:00 pm Tuesday. I mention this because I _think_ I remember running into a problem with this when archiving old messages from a pre-Mailman incarnation of a list.)
-- Larry Kuenning larry@qhpress.org
On Mon, 17 Jun 2013 07:32:11 -0700 Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> wrote:
For my use, I want to be able to look at conversations in the order that they're happening so I can cherry pick which portions of the conversation to forward and which to reject. Seeing the messages grouped by address doesn't help me so much. I can see wanting the existing view sometimes, but when I want "sorted by time", I want purely sorted by time so I can figure out what to forward and what not to.
It is potentially possible that optionally sorting by subject and then by time might be cool, but I really don't need that and sometimes it might get annoying. Simplest is best for my use case.
Perry
-- Perry E. Metzger perry@piermont.com
On 06/15/2013 08:09 AM, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
I don't think it would be too difficult. I have some thoughts on how to do it. I'll post a follow up later when I have time to flesh it out.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
On 06/16/2013 08:48 AM, Mark Sapiro wrote:
Attached is a preliminary patch to Mailman/Cgi/admindb.py.
The patch includes a hard coded setting
SUMMARY = 1
which presents the held messages summary in time order. Setting
SUMMARY = 0
produces the current grouping by sender in sender sequence with the additional guarantee that each sender's messages are listed in time sequence within that sender's box.
My initial thought is that this will be a list setting, although it could just be a button on the summary page to reorder the display, but then there probably should be a 'default order' choice somewhere.
I didn't do group by sender but present the groups in time sequence. If there is a large outcry for this, I'll consider it, but it leads to option overload, i.e sorted by senders oldest or most recent.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
On 06/19/2013 03:02 PM, Mark Sapiro wrote:
Attached is a preliminary patch to Mailman/Cgi/admindb.py.
Sorry, the patch was removed by content filtering. It should make it this time.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
On 06/19/2013 04:56 PM, Mark Sapiro wrote:
It would have been better if I hadn't posted that one. It had some bugs.
This one is a bit more thoroughly tested. It also has a set of radio buttons to select the sequence which can be 'grouped and sorted by sender', 'grouped by sender and sorted by time' or 'ungrouped and sorted by time'.
Feedback on this would be appreciated.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
On 06/20/2013 02:57 PM, Mark Sapiro wrote:
I noticed an issue that could have thrown an exception in some "shouldn't happen" case. Here's a corrected patch.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
Just for information, I have installed the patch for message ordering in the admindb held message summary in the Bazaar branch at <https://code.launchpad.net/~mailman-coders/mailman/2.2> (lp:mailman/2.2).
This branch is essentially the 2.1 branch with the addition of a few features and bug fixes as described under 2.2.0a0 in its NEWS file. The original goals for the 2.2 branch have been superceded by Mailman 3, and at this point, the intent is that it will never be released. It is however, tested and stable and is the basis of the Mailman I run on my production server. Most, if not all the differences between this branch and the 2.1 branch have not been backported to 2.1 for i18n reasons.
Note however that the fact that I run it in production doesn't necessarily mean that the held message ordering is heavily tested as I seldom see more than one held message at a time on my lists.
Anyway, if you are interested in this message ordering feature and possibly others, look at the 2.2.0a0 section at <http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~mailman-coders/mailman/2.2/view/head:/NEWS>, and consider using this branch.
Caveat: Topics regexps are handled differently (more in agreement with documentation) in this branch than they are in 2.1. If you use Topics and install this branch, your Topics regexps will be converted, but if you go back to 2.1, they won't be converted back, so it would be a good idea to use bin/config_list before installing 2.2 to back up any topics settings so they can be restored if you go back to 2.1. Also, because of the way Mailman detects the need for updates, if you YoYo back and forth, Topics regexps will only be converted the first time, so consider also backing up the 2.2 settings.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
Deal all, > I typically would prefer to see the queue of messages awaiting
moderation in time order, not alphabetically by email address as happens by default.
I totally second that notion. I have been thinking about this several times before, too. Would indeed be a very useful addition.
Jan
On 06/17/2013 01:58 AM, Jan Lausch wrote:
OK. Since this may be more widely used, here's a question? The current summary groups all the messages from a single sender into one 'box'. If we sort the boxes[1] by time, should multiple messages from a single address be in separate, time sorted boxes or should they still be grouped in a single box, and if the latter should the boxes be time sorted by oldest or newest in the box.
[1] A proper feature would redesign the boxes, but I'm not going there, and I'm not going to think about checking in the multiple box case for conflicting checkbox options applied to the same sender.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
Dear Mark,
should multiple messages from a single address be in separate, time sorted boxes [...]
Just my 2ct: keep it simple, no need to have many config options here: Just keep the "one box per sender"-idea, but sort the boxes by the time of the latest email from that sender.
And thus replace the old sorting order: "alphabetical" doesn't have any practical advantage (= someone missing the way it worked yet) in my eyes.
Use case "time-sorted" e.g.: find this one mail the user just sent a minute ago in a queue full of SPAM.
jan
Richard Damon writes:
I will say that for a list I run, I find the alphabetical ordering useful.
Indeed. Ordering will be an option, and since this request is hardly a FAQ (though I think it a pretty obviously worthwhile feature), I suppose that the default will be the traditional alphabetical ordering.
My 2 cents for Mark Sapiro's question:
The original post spoke of a list "where all messages are moderated, and conversations are long." A moderator who is trying to track the progress of a long conversation (while perhaps moderating for civility) would probably want to see all messages in strict time order, oldest first, without grouping by author. I would want it that way on my lists if they had enough traffic to make manual sorting tedious.
This could be especially important in cases where writers are sending off-list copies to each other, and thus sometimes replying to posts that haven't even reached the list in moderated form yet. You don't want to make a moderation decision about a reply before deciding what to do about the post being replied to.
(And of course "time order" must handle time zones accurately, e.g. a message sent from London at 1:00 am Wednesday should precede one sent from New York at 10:00 pm Tuesday. I mention this because I _think_ I remember running into a problem with this when archiving old messages from a pre-Mailman incarnation of a list.)
-- Larry Kuenning larry@qhpress.org
On Mon, 17 Jun 2013 07:32:11 -0700 Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> wrote:
For my use, I want to be able to look at conversations in the order that they're happening so I can cherry pick which portions of the conversation to forward and which to reject. Seeing the messages grouped by address doesn't help me so much. I can see wanting the existing view sometimes, but when I want "sorted by time", I want purely sorted by time so I can figure out what to forward and what not to.
It is potentially possible that optionally sorting by subject and then by time might be cool, but I really don't need that and sometimes it might get annoying. Simplest is best for my use case.
Perry
-- Perry E. Metzger perry@piermont.com
participants (6)
-
Jan Lausch -
Larry Kuenning -
Mark Sapiro -
Perry E. Metzger -
Richard Damon -
Stephen J. Turnbull