[Mailman-Users] Can new-user approval be assigned to moderators by subgroup membership of user?

[Patrick Bogen]

On 5/12/06, Ned T. Sahin <sahin at post.harvard.edu> wrote:
> Goal: launch a university-wide mailing list for students at a large
> university.
>
> * Each student needs to be verified by a moderator before being allowed
> to join, so non-students can't.
> * Problem: too much work for one central moderator or set of moderators,
> to know who is or isn't a student (potentially 40,000 users).
> * Luckily, each student lives in some dorm on campus and each dorm has a
> master who should know all the students, so the natural moderator
> responsibility should fall on dorm masters.
>
> * On Mailman user screen, student should be able to pick his/her dorm
> from a drop-down list as required part of the signup.
> * Then Mailman should send the request specifically and only to the dorm
> master for the student.
> * That dorm master should be able to approve the request.
>

Well, your registrar should already have students' emails.. *ducks*


Ahem. The best way to handle this is probably with umbrella lists.
I.e., Dorm A has a list, 'DormA,' with its appointed guy as a
moderator. DormB, DormC, Admin, etc., and then you have an Announce
list, which is an umbrella list, which sends to DormA, DormB, DormC,
Admin, etc.

There's no way to do /exactly/ what you ask for, which is to maintain
some kind of 'group' metadata for users and moderators, and dispatch
requests according to this metadata. You, or someone else, would need
to implement this kind of functionality on top of mailman. While not
terribly difficult in and of itself, you'd have to rework some of the
code extensively, since currently a 'moderator' is just an email
address, and doesn't have *any* metadata attached to it.

(Or you could hire a poor college student to do this for you.
*coughLikeMecough*)

-- 
- Patrick Bogen