[Mailman-Users] Moderator permissions or rights

[Mark Sapiro]

Ronald Nissley wrote:
>
>Fair enough...the issue is that I want some of the moderators to also have
>access to membership management without access to list functionality.
>Is there a good way to limit what a list admin can do?


You can limit the pages available in the admin interface, but this is
probably not satisfactory for various reasons.

Look at ADMIN_CATEGORIES in Defaults.py. You can redefine this list in
mm_cfg.py and leave pages out. This means there will be no link at the
top of the admin pages, and if you try to go to one by URL, you get
the General page instead.

The issues with doing this are:

If a page is not in the list, no one can go to it, even by URL except
for General Options.

Even if you remove 'general' from the list, the General Options page is
still the default when you go to the admin pages so changes can always
be made on that page.

There is no way like this to remove or limit the "other administrative
activities" links so you can still go to the "Edit the public HTML
pages and text files" link.


>If not, I'll probably
>handle any membership management tasks myself. We run a few smaller lists,
>so it shouldn't be a big deal. My issue with giving the moderators list
>admin access is that because of their roles, they understand only enough
>about computers to get by, and frankly there is a trust factor. Not that I
>think they would intentionally "hose" a list, but I don't really think they
>appreciate how easy it would be to do so.


People in this situation mostly tend to be afraid of screwing up, so if
they have good instructions for the membership tasks they need to do,
they probably won't touch anything else. It's not a guarantee though.


>Maybe my approach should focus more on getting good, consistent backups of
>Mailman configuration and data, and then give them the list admin passwords?


That might be a good solution. If you seldom change a list, you could
just use bin/config_list to dump the configuration every time you
change it, and keep two or three generations of these.

-- 
Mark Sapiro <msapiro at value.net>       The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan