[Asterisk-Users] Development Process comment and Email list suggestion

[Siggi Langauf]

On Fri, 9 Jan 2004 info-lists at robertc.de wrote:

[...]
> Regarding the email list: A number of people have suggested creating more
> email lists. I think this is not a good idea because there will be even
> more cross posting than there is now between -dev and -users.

That's a very valid point.

[...]
> various modules of R/3 (ie: topic areas) were managed by using (and
> inforcing) topic keywords in the subject line.  Enforcing the list
> guidelines was a 2 hour or so task each night for the moderators (we had
> several that rotated weekly shifts) but it made the list usage fairly
> easy.  Subscribers could pick the topics of interest and then (assuming
> people followed the guidelines) their messages from the list were
> restricted to those topics.  Dealing with chronic violators was always a
> judgement call by the moderator-on-duty: if a person was INTENTIONALLY not
> following guidelines then they were blocked. If they didn't understand the
> guideline then it was explained again to them and life went on.

Generally, I like this idea. Note however, that there doesn't seem to be
any dedicated moderator workforce for this list at all. (At least I've
never seen any of the posts ever approved or rejected by a moderator that
I've posted from the wrong address...)
So for educating people we'd need some voluntary moderators, first. (No,
I'm not volunteering.)

[...]
> There would definately be a cost for the ListServe license (since there is
> a commercial profit from the list)  but I think this software is best able
> to handle what we need to do.  If Mark and Digium want to go in this
> direction I would be glad to coordinate the moderation.

*hehe* Caught you here.
Luckily, it doesn't take ListServe or any license. From the NEWS file[1]
of MailMan 2.1:

    - Topic Filters
        o A new feature has been added called "Topic Filters".  A list
          administrator can create topics, which are essentially
          regular expression matches against Subject: and Keyword:
          headers (including such pseudo-headers if they appear in the
          first few lines of the body of a message).

          List members can then `subscribe' to various topics, which
          allows them to filter out any messages that don't match a
          topic, or to filter out any message that does match a
          topic.  This can be useful for high volume lists where not
          everyone will be interested in every message.

As that's exactly the feature you described, a simple upgrade of Digium's
MailMan would cut it.
As you're volunteering to organize the moderation, that should be a
realistic plan, especially if you consider that the upgrade brings quite
some bug fixes and improved performance due to better MTA integration...

Cheers,
	Siggi

[1]
http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/mailman/mailman/NEWS?rev=2.43&view=markup