[Mailman-Developers] Pre-select defer/accept/discard/reject for all mails

[Terri Oda]

On Jul 17, 2004, at 8:25 AM, Jan-Benedict Glaw wrote:
> I'm managing some Mailman based lists and get "some" spam each day.
> Actually, > 95% of all emails kept for being revised is Spam, and it
> takes some time to navigate through all of them and click on their
> "discard" radio button. But changing the default from "defer" to
> "discard" isn't all that wise either, it may break other people's setup
> horribly. That is why I thought about having a small table ontop with
> the four chooses, which fire up a JScript to equally check the radio
> buttons for all mails in this admindb session.

I love the idea, since this question comes up pretty frequently (link 
to FAQ and contents of that entry below).

This sounds a little nicer than the checkbox we've got in 2.1.5 (again, 
see below), but is Javascript going to be more of a pain to support?

FAQ Entry:

http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq03.026.htp

"3.26. Is there an easy way to discard all messages waiting to be 
reviewed?
If you have a list where non members can post but their messages are 
moderated, you'll have to deal with a lot of spam. After sometime, just 
a small percentage of them will be good posts. It's boring to click to 
discard each messages. A better solution is to approve the good ones, 
and use a javascript link to mark to discard all.

First, open your bookmark manager and add the following link as an URL:

  javascript:var el=document.forms[0].elements;for (var i=0; 
i<el.length;i++) if (el[i].type=='radio' && el[i].value==3) 
void(el[i].checked=true);

Now visit the moderation page, and visit the bookmark. All the messages 
will be marked to discard, just press the button.

I've tested it just with mozilla, but it should work in all browser 
versions that support javascript links.

For Mailman 2.1.5, we find the following update which is mentioned in 
the mailman-2.1.5/NEWS file:

     - The admindb page has a checkbox that allows you to discard all 
held
       messages that are marked Defer.  On heavy lists with lots of spam 
holds,
       this makes clearing them much faster."