[Mailman-Developers] Re: [Mailman-Users] Can't change with admin pages

[Per Starback]

On mailman-users I wrote about problems I had with one particular list
that I couldn't admin with the web interface.  Now I know why, and I
send this followup to the developer list too, since it might be reason
to change something.

It turned out that Mailman never sent out any cookies for that
particular list.  Why?  Because the list administrator (not me!) had
changed the Base URL for the list by removing "http://" at the
beginning of the url. (I don't know what he was trying to achieve with
that, but I can understand that some people might be tempted to that
with all the non-URL "URLs" that are printed everywhere like that.)

Mailman uses the Base URL for cookie stuff.  In MakeCookie there is a
line

        path = urlparse(self.web_page_url)[2] # '/mailman'

For one of my sensible lists path here became '/mailman/' (note:  not
exactly as in the comment) but for the bogus list it became instead
something else, and I guess that's where things started to go wrong.
I changed the Base URL back, and then it works fine again.

So what should the lesson be?  I'm not sure, but it is nice if Mailman
can support clueless list administrators (as long as the main Mailman
administrator has a clue) so I don't think the right answer is just
"so don't do that!".

Probably it shouldn't be allowed to set "Base URL" to any string.
I suggest instead that the Mailman administrator should be able to set
what basenames should be possible, and the list administrators only
can chose from those values. (Most sites would only have one possible
value, and then that section could preferrably be deleted from the
list admin pages.)

-- 
Per Starback <starback@ling.uu.se> <http://stp.ling.uu.se/~starback/me.html>
 "Life is but a gamble!  Let flipism chart your ramble!"

P.S.  I loved the comments in MakeCookie!