[Mailman-Users] Custom Sign-Up Form

[Brad Knowles]

At 9:49 AM +0200 10/17/06, Zbigniew Szalbot wrote:

>  English is not first language for me so I am not sure I should
>  contribute but a couple of very simple things for starters.

Actually, I find that people who are new to a subject like this are 
the ones that are in the best position to help us better understand 
how things look to a person who is new to the project, and therefore 
better able to help us understand where we are weak.  Some of the 
biggest contributors have been around long enough that it's hard to 
step out of our minds and set aside all of our knowledge and look at 
things from that perspective.

>  1. Place all list templates (like a sign-up page, confirmation
>  page, email text, etc.) in one place in admin. I may be wrong
>  but at present not everything can be directly edited in admin.
>  Even if it can, the information could be much better organized
>  so that I knew what I am dealing with.

Part of the problem is that there is a lot of stuff already in the 
admin pages.  It has to be organized somehow.  And sometimes it's a 
judgement call as to which things get organized where, because there 
may be several different ways that you could organize things.  One 
method may make more sense to me, while a different method may make 
more sense to you.

Better organization is clearly important, but just throwing 
everything on a single page is not the answer.  What we need help 
with is getting a better understanding of what things are truly 
important and deserve to be first, and what things may be less 
important and able be pushed further down.


This goes for the code itself, the actual admin web interface, the 
FAQ Wizard entries, the Wiki, and pretty much everything else.

If you can help us identify (with detailed specifics) what things 
about the current organization do not make sense, and how things 
could be better organized, that would be the first and biggest step 
towards actually making a sizable contribution.

>  These changes would make it a lot easier for people to follow.

And it took me to this point to figure out that you're just talking 
about the "list info" page, where potential new subscribers can sign 
up for the list.

You see, this stuff is complex.  You've got good points, but just 
editing a FAQ entry isn't going to help make these changes happen. 
These kinds of changes are going to require editing standard 
templates that are provided out-of-the-box, as well as the associated 
code.


To help us keep track of this sort of request, the best thing to do 
is to file an RFE via the page at 
<http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=103&atid=350103> and/or via 
the wiki at <http://wiki.list.org/>.  The problem here is that some 
of the affected programmers don't subscribe to this list, so in order 
for them to see your request it needs to be appropriately filed.

>  P.S. English text is at least to some extent understandable but
>  translations are much more difficult to follow. As much as I am
>  thankful that there are wonderful people here who did the
>  translation into Polish, I cannot speak favourably of its
>  quality.

This is something where you could help make an even greater 
contribution.  There is a whole separate Internationalization page at 
<http://www.list.org/i18n.html>, and they discuss translation issues 
on entirely separate mailing lists.  I suggest you hook up with the 
current Translation Champions for Polish (as listed on that page), 
and discuss the subject with them.

But you are correct that the simpler the source material they have to 
work with, the more likely that the translations will be correct, or 
at least easier to understand.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad at shub-internet.org>

Trend Micro has announced that they will cancel the stop.mail-abuse.org
mail forwarding service as of 15 November 2006.  If you have an old
e-mail account for me at this domain, please make sure you correct that
with the current address.