[Mailman-Users] Restrict archives to Administrator

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Mark Dale writes:

 > I've posted some notes on restricting a list's archive to Administrators
 > only. They may be of use to some folks.

Could you say something about the use case?  If there's a common
enough reason for doing this, we (the committers) should think about
adding such features to Mailman 3 (Mailman 2 is up to Mark, but I
think he really really wants that in security mods only mode).  But I
don't see the point, since subscribers (moderated or not) will be
receiving (and can locally archive) the posts.

 > It's a hack of Jim Popovitch's code which restricts archive access to
 > unmoderated subscribers.

Ditto.

The only scenario where either of these restrictions makes sense to me
(given my own experience) would be a harrassment case, where (1) the
perpetrator is moderated (very common scenario, or at least it's often
threatened) and (2) set to no-mail (not something that people do
AFAIK, but I've never been on a list where that would be necessary,
and have never heard of it being done).  In the harrassment scenario
the perpetrator is typically booted from the list, solving on-list
harrassment, surveillance via list traffic, and surveillance via
archive access simultaneously (assuming private archives, of course).

I guess you could argue that archive-access restrictions inconvenience
those who "shouldn't" have access to list posts, but I'm not sure why
that is useful or desirable.

Again, I'm not saying these are bad ideas, just that I want more
information to decide if they are useful enough to add to Mailman 3.

Steve