[Mailman-Users] how to arrange a list with 'affiliate' members

[Barnaby Scott]

I am trying to configure a list or group of lists to
exhibit the following behaviour, but have been having
trouble:

I run a list called 'discuss', which is a discussion
list for members of our organisation. We would also
like to invite a handful of people to be 'affiliate'
members, but who would not have quite the same
experience of the list.

We want these 'affiliate members' to be able to post
to 'discuss', and any replies to their posts to be
distributed to them. In addition we would like regular
members to be able to insert a keyword to indicate
that the conversation they are starting is to include
these 'affiliate members'. But for all other list
traffic, they would excluded.

The most obvious mechanism would be to subscribe the
affilate members as full members of 'discuss' and use
Topics - restricting them to receive only posts with
[affiliate] in the subject. However, I can see no way
of preventing them lifting this restriction from
themselves, and in any case they would be obliged to
remember to use the keyword if they wanted any
replies.

The only other solution I could think of was to have
another list - say 'open', of which 'discuss' was a
member. This would allow control of who was an
affiliate member, and would take care of inbound posts
to 'discuss'. However, to allow replies back to the
affiliate members would involve either:

 *Having the 'discuss's reply-to UN-munged (which I am
against because we have 100% non-technical people, and
no replies would ever reach any list at all if they
had to remember to hit 'reply to all'!)

 or 

 *Having 'open' being a member of 'discuss' (in
addition to 'discuss' being a member of 'open').
Presumably this is what is technically known as a BAD
THING!

I wouldn't be at all surprised if I have overlooked
something very obvious - in any case all suggestions
would be very gratefully received!

Thanks


	
		
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