On Wed, Oct 01, 2003, Grant Parnell wrote: > How about we add my proposal of making non-member posts subject to > having the email address validated much like you do when subscribing. > Then we can make posting to the list available to members plus a list > of validated exceptions. The validation may optionally expire after an > arbitrary period of say 3 months.
If we do close the list, it's probably best to limit the options to those that Mailman 2.1 (our mail software) makes relatively easy, rather than have a policy that requires we maintain additional software to implement the policy. Mailman *can* do any of open posting, closed to subscribers only, or all posts moderated. Also, Mailman does have an "accept filter" -- a list of non-subscribed addresses that can post without being held for moderation, so it would certainly be possible to add people to that (probably when they try to post from an unsubscribed address for the first time), but it doesn't have a expiry feature. > How would this be done technically? Possibly a procmail filter that > just checks if the sender is on a) main list or b) exception list, if > not, generate a 'subscribe' request on the sender's behalf to the > 'exceptions' mailing list that cannot be posted to, they would then > have to subscribe to the exceptions list. If they're on either a) or > b) lists forward onto normal mailman stuff. Mailman doesn't maintain the "non subscribed, can post" list as a separate *mailing list*, it's just a list of addresses somewhere in its database. So you can't *subscribe* to it. The closest equivalent is subscribing to the main list and then turning list delivery off, and that's a two step process. Most closed lists do end up saying something like "if you want to post from a second address, subscribe it and turn list delivery off". Whether we'd choose maintaining an accept filter, or asking people to subscribe their other address with delivery off, or some combination, would be up to the admins probably, in the event of the vote being in favour of a closed list. -Mary -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
