[Mailman-Users] Polling or voting on list

Stephen J. Turnbull stephen at xemacs.org
Sun Aug 25 02:40:50 CEST 2013


e.c. writes:

 > Thanks, Seun. I suspected as much. The purpose of the prospective voting is
 > to offload all moderator functions onto the general membership in those
 > cases where the mailman program itself is not able mediate those functions
 > (e.g. having owners set maximum daily posting limits per member and for the
 > whole list).

This may not give you the results you hope for in the context of a
mailing list.  It's commonly seen on web forums, in the form of +/-
buttons on comments so that spammy or off-topic ones can be moderated
out of sight.  However for this to reflect general opinion of the
subscribers on a mailing list, you would need to quarantine the
message, then wait for a quorum to vote.  This is disruptive of
message flow, at the very least, and would likely introduce (new)
biases in the posts, due to the fact that lurkers are different from
(volunteer) moderators are more or less different from posters.

If you want to experiment, it would be an interesting experiment.  But
if you want to preserve the spirit of the list while lessening the
burden on administrators (specifically moderators), I would suggest
converting to a web forum.

There is a third possibility, which is to wait for Mailman 3 and see
what comes up.  Mailman 3 itself is going to be basically the same as
Mailman 2 in terms of post distribution and moderation.  However,
instead of bundling Pipermail, which by today's standards isn't even a
bare-bones archive manager (no search function), the recommended
archive manager is HyperKitty.  HyperKitty is very much "in progress,"
but already has some social networking/web forum-like features.

Good luck with your experiment!

Steve



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