I guess we might be considered a fascist regime, but mass-subscribe is an invauable tool here at our university. Hardly any of our lists are opt-in (what a nightmare that would be for us - we need our lists up and populated on exact dates and ready to roll). We have class lists, lab lists, club lists, team lists, student lists, employee lists, security lists (some of which contain every soul on our campus - rarely ever used (never used yet, in fact, knock wood) for Virginia Tech-type campus-wide emergencies, etc).
Many of the lists are automatically populated by cron on certain dates. There is very little involvement really, and all of the email addresses used to populate these lists are from our own domains. Sure we have the odd cranky professor or student who wants off, and we comply by setting their no-mail flag for them (unless it's the security list - they have no opt-out option on that one (and a few others) and that is written into their contract when they aquire an account from us). But in all these years, we've had very few complaints and everything has run very smoothly. We usually comply quickly if someone wants out, but we would never in a million years want people to have to opt-in! That would truly be a disaster (confused users, thousands of phone calls and help queries, and worst of all, porously-populated, inconsistent lists, with no guarantees that the right students got critical class/lab-related messages, etc). This invisible behind-the-scenes subscription method is the way to go for us. None of our Mailman subscribers even know they have their own list passwords, and we don't want them to! (I'd say about .01% are clever/curious enough to figure it out - I'm not implying that they are dopes, but rather they are just overwhelmed by the hundreds of new things they have to learn coming to a university - we don't want to pile on with even more stuff they need to know). I think that by running the server ourselves (and using only addresses from our domains) warrants this admittedly fascist attitude. Perhaps the safest way to handle this (in future releases) is to make mass-subscribe=NO the default setting for new installs, but not removing the option altogether. Thanks. - jim - PS I am pretty sure that this discussion only involves removing mass-subscribe from the GUI (and not the command line) but many of our lists require mass- subscribes on certain dates from the GUI as well (usually conducted by the departmental secretaries). ------------------------------------------------------ Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9
