[Mailman-Developers] Changing admin address for "umbrella" list subscribers

[Scott]

On Thu, Oct 15, 1998 at 04:31:55PM -0400, Ken Manheimer wrote:
| A while back i implemented a mailman feature to facilitate having
| "umbrella" lists to which other lists could be subscribed.  I would
| like to change it slightly, and want to see if i'd be messing anybody
| up with the change.  I'm not even sure if anybody but me uses the
| feature, so first i'll explain what it's about, and then i'll explain
| the problem.
| 
| The idea is to enable maillists that are composed of only other
| maillists, as "subscribers".  That way, announcements of interest to
| groups of lists could be sent to the encompassing list.  This may
| sound peculiar, but it actually makes sense in the context of, for
| example, activities that have regional groups doing their regional
| thing, but also occasionally collecting together for, eg, national
| conclaves, or for discussions of common issues across the regions,
| etc.  (In fact, i'm establishing a network of lists for people who do
| something i'm part of, contact improvisation, and this arrangement
| looks really pretty good for us.)

neat!

| The only special provision i had to make for this arrangment is an
| admin setting so that the members administrative stuff, like the
| monthly password reminders, are _not_ posted to the subscribed lists,
| but to their administrators.  I created the 'reminders_to_admins'
| option, and set it so that the reminders would go to the
| 'list-admin@host.domain' account, rather than 'list@host.domain'.
| (I'm pretty sure this was pre 1.0b4, so it's been there for a while,
| probably unnoticed by most people.)
| 
| The problem is that it may be that '-owner' is a more prevalent suffix
| for list administrator addresses than '-admin'.  At least, that's what
| makelist.com seems to use, and from my probing they don't seem to
| support the '-admin' alias, while the policy for mailman is to support
| both.  So i'm considering changing the option to go to '-owner'
| address instead of '-admin', but before i do that i wanted to find out 
| whether (1) anyone already depends on the '-admin' option, and (2)
| whether anyone has objections to making the switch, in any case.

there are probably still lots of mailman lists out there that didn't
get installed with the -owner address.  it might be a good idea to
make note of this come next release.

| (We could add *another* option to designate the suffix, but that
| doesn't strike me as a good solution - we'd be better off striving for
| some standard, than encouraging fragmentation here.  What good would
| one choice or another be if some of the subscriber lists within the
| umbrella have one and some have the other?)

hmmm. it seems to me that -owner is probably a standard enough suffix
to use for this.  Even if it weren't available for a particular list,
it seems likely that any organization grouping lists together like
this would have the administrative pull to get a -owner forwarding
address set up for such an enterprise.  

| Any clear feelings, one way or the other, from anyone?  I plan on
| making the change within the next few days, but can still be dissuaded 
| by solid arguments...

I like the idea :)

scott