The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[Steve Shipway <address@concealed>]

I agree there is value to both approaches – the White/Modlist way works for us, but not necessarily for others, and it is good that both methods are possible.

 

The problem with using additional database fields to do this is that, of course, it means you need to modify the database schema, and the admin cannot maintain the flags via the web interface.

 

If you hold the flag in the custom subscriber attributes, then it avoids these problems, but then the user can view and change the values, which is not necessarily what you want.

 

I’m working on a (very small) patch for Sympa 6.2 that allows the Custom Subscriber Attributes to have two more types – Hidden and ReadOnly in addition to the current Optional and Required.  Hidden attributes are implicitly optional, and are only visible and changeable by list admins.  ReadOnly  are optional and only changeable by list admins.   With this patch, you can set a ‘moderated’ subscriber attribute to be Hidden and remove the problem.   This is done by a small change in ListDef.pm combined with a change to the edit_attributes.tt2 and subscriber_table.tt2 (there also needs to be another change to enforce the non-update if people try to cheat).  There should also be a configurable Default value for custom attributes, but this is proving a little harder to implement than I had expected…  I think this would be a valuable improvement to Sympa and I’ll submit the patch back to the project when I have it working.

 

Steve

 

Steve Shipway

T: +64 9 3737 599 ext 86487

E: address@concealed

(GNU Terry Pratchett)

 

From: address@concealed [mailto:address@concealed] On Behalf Of address@concealed
Sent: Friday, 25 September 2015 9:54 a.m.
To: David Verdin; address@concealed
Subject: Re: [sympa-users] Whitelist/Modlist for Sympa 6.2

 

I see value to both approaches.

I think blacklists are especially useful as a separate list, because by definition they involve addresses that are not on a list.

Having whitelists and (especially) moderated status be a separate list is something I never liked about Mj2, and am queasy about here. I realize that you might want to whitelist some non-subscriber addresses - but for subscribers (for this and moderation) I would prefer to have their address exist in only one place, their subscription, so their address changes completely if they change it...

 

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