[Mailman-Developers] GSOC Project Discussion

[Richard Wackerbarth]

On Sat, May 18, 2013 at 1:46 AM, Barry Warsaw <barry at list.org> wrote:
> 
>> On May 13, 2013, at 10:52 PM, varun sharma wrote:
>> 
>> Question: Should you be able to add a vacation stop to moderator or owner
>> emails?
> 
> I think the owner or moderators also should be allowed to use the in
> vacation suspension of mails from the mailing lists they moderate or own,
> given all the administrative tasks that need their attention must be added
> to their ToDo queue.
> eg:
> Lets say there is a mailing list that requires moderator's approval for any
> new user to join. If one of the moderator has set  "on vacation" for his
> account, then he should only get "pending approval request"  in his ToDo
> task list. If some other moderator responds to that request, then it will
> be automatically removed from the ToDo list of all the moderators,
> including the one "on the vacation" and the moderator "on vacation" will
> never know if there was any request.
> 
> Also there can be email alerts as soon as some task is added to the ToDo
> list but if the user is "on vacation" then he will not receive any of these
> emails until he disables his "on vacation" flag. All the pending ToDo
> tasks/(tasks done in his absence) may be emailed him at once when he comes
> back from the vacation.

Barry,
You have used some phrases that cause me to infer that the -core would have to keep extensive information about moderation requests.

For example: "(tasks done in his absence) may be emailed him at once when he comes back from the vacation."
I hope that you meant "tasks NOT done". Otherwise, someone would have to maintain a history of the tasks. (Although such an archive would appear to be a task more appropriate for the KittyStore and HyperKitty retrieval mechanisms.

Now, since "-core" maintains the queue of pending tasks and is also the agent that sends out emails, do you propose the add an "on demand" type of "digest" for the moderation queue?
We might think of this as a rendering of the current task queue in an RFC-822-styled format analogous to the REST request that is delivered in a JSON based format. Presumedly, since this is a "push" notification, the "return from vacation" process could trigger this request.

Richard