making Mailman CAN-SPAM compliant (was Re: [Mailman-Developers] Hashing member passwords in config.pck)

[Brad Knowles]

At 8:54 AM -0500 2005-02-16, Tobias Eigen wrote:

>  I know all this - and I know you know it, and I know all Mailman geeks
>  like us get it. The problem is with regular, every day people who are
>  expecting (and really can be expected to expect) Yahoogroups type
>  interfaces.

	All I can say is that Mailman is a non-profit open source 
project, run by a group of people in whatever spare time they can 
manage to scrape together.

	The Linux folks haven't cracked the ease-of-use aspects of their 
OS compared to Microsoft, not even for the companies that are 
spending large quantities of money to try to make that happen.  We're 
a much, much smaller group, and although this is also a smaller 
target, I don't see us being likely to succeed in this area where the 
Linux folks have not.

	If someone wanted to pay large sums of money to make an open 
source Yahoo! Groups-beating package, and pay people to work on that 
as their full-time job, we might be able to change this situation -- 
in time.

	If people really need those kinds of features today, then they 
should be using Yahoo! Groups and not Mailman.


	In the meanwhile, we do what we can, and we accept what donations 
of time, code, or money that is offered to us.

>  Has anybody considered having a usability expert look at the Mailman
>  interfaces and redesign them so they make more sense from a user's point
>  of view?

	I don't know, but I would doubt it.  For the official story, 
you'd have to ask Barry.

>           How easy is it to customize these pages? Are they perchance
>  templatable?

	The template facilities within Mailman are fairly limited, but I 
have not looked into whether they attempt to address these areas.

>>  	You can pretty much do all of that today.  Go to the listinfo page
>>  and log in with your e-mail address and password.
>
>  Perhaps, but you can't do it "easily".

	The miracle of a talking dog is not how well it speaks or the 
fact that it always uses proper grammar, but that it speaks at all.

	Perhaps with your help, we can help that dog speak a little better.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad at stop.mail-abuse.org>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
     Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

   SAGE member since 1995.  See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.