[Mailman-Users] Suspend a Subscriber

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Dennis Putnam writes:

 > Is there a way to suspend or otherwise prevent a subscriber from posting
 > to a list and send a notice of same, without actually unsubscribing and
 > officially banning them?

1. In the Membership page, set the member to moderated.

2. In the Privacy | Sender Filters page, set the member_moderation_action
   to "Reject" (*not* "Discard").

3. Edit the member_moderation_notice to taste.  You cannot make the
   notice itself member-specific (although it can be personalized with
   the usual %(variable) substitutions I suppose), so make sure it is
   generic enough to cover all the cases that you envision.  The
   contact for reinstatement requests should probably not be a
   personal address. The LIST-owner address is a good candidate.

This is totally automatic, and the ball stays in their court.
Alternatively (suggested elsewhere, repeated here for completeness),

2'. Set member_moderation_action to "Hold".

3'. N/A (I don't know any way to change the standard hold notice).

In this case, you will (1) need to review the post in the moderation
page, and (2) directly contact the member regarding the possibility of
disabling moderation for them (see 3', above).

Personally, I favor the totally automatic method for a truly abusive
member, as it sends a stronger message.  I also use "Hold"-style
moderation, but this is more for a situation where several members
each feel the need to have the last word on some topic (typically an
off-topic :-).  If I'm in doubt about whether the member is truly
abusive or just unclear about the rules, I use Hold and engage them
off-list.  I only give one warning, though.

In the rare case that I need to do both, that sucks, but I just use
Hold and then manually reject the abuser, cutting and pasting the
automatic reject message.

Obviously this is pretty staff-intensive; I wouldn't want to do it if
I were supervising a lot of lists with random memberships.  Most of my
lists are quite cohesive, though, so any of the above is pretty
unusual.

 > I know I can add them to the ban list, but what happens to their
 > subscription settings? Are they also automatically unsubscribed or
 > do they just get a banned message when they post while the
 > subscription information remains in tact? TIA.

AFAIK, "ban" means "ban".  They are unsubscribed and prevented from
resubscribing.  This is a last resort.

If the list is open-subscription, banning is not very effective for
hardened miscreants; they just get a throwaway address at hotmail and
start in again.

HTH,
Steve