>>>>> "Barnaby" == Barnaby Scott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Barnaby> I am trying to configure a list or group of lists to Barnaby> exhibit the following behaviour, but have been having Barnaby> trouble: Barnaby> I run a list called 'discuss', which is a discussion list Barnaby> for members of our organisation. We would also like to Barnaby> invite a handful of people to be 'affiliate' members, but Barnaby> who would not have quite the same experience of the list. Barnaby> We want these 'affiliate members' to be able to post to Barnaby> 'discuss', and any replies to their posts to be Barnaby> distributed to them. In addition we would like regular Barnaby> members to be able to insert a keyword to indicate that Barnaby> the conversation they are starting is to include these Barnaby> 'affiliate members'. But for all other list traffic, they Barnaby> would excluded. Why not just have two separate lists, and automatically subscribe the "discuss" members to the the "affiliate" list? No keyword needed, just address your post correctly. Reply-To will not go to an "unsafe" place (unless a discuss member decides to move a thread from the "affiliates" list to the "discuss" list, and forgets to change the address---but I don't see why this is more likely than forgetting to remove the [affiliate] tag). Since the discuss list is apparently closed (ie, membership requires moderator approval), this imposes a slight burden on the moderator (I don't think vanilla Mailman provides a facility where subscribing to one list subscribes you to a second list automatically), but otherwise is just what the doctor ordered AFAICS. Barnaby> The only other solution I could think of was to have Barnaby> another list - say 'open', of which 'discuss' was a Barnaby> member. This would allow control of who was an affiliate Barnaby> member, and would take care of inbound posts to Barnaby> 'discuss'. However, to allow replies back to the Barnaby> affiliate members would involve either: Barnaby> *Having the 'discuss's reply-to UN-munged Yup, in this case Reply-To Munging Is Unquestionably Harmful. Barnaby> (which I am against because we have 100% non-technical Barnaby> people, and no replies would ever reach any list at all Barnaby> if they had to remember to hit 'reply to all'!) It's a shame that you and list admins who think like you didn't start lobbying their members and the vendors to fix their broken MUAs ten years ago, but that's no reason not to start now---it's not the last time this kind of case will arise. N.B. Stop using "non-technical" users as an excuse. If they're typing replies, they have sufficiently well-developed muscle memory to handle this, too. The problem is that the users, quite rightly IMO, resist using reply-to-all because it pollutes their screen with unwanted junk addresses, and annoys fellow list members with duplicate posts. They "know there's a better way," and they are right---but their MUAs don't offer it. So fix the damn MUAs, and everybody's happy. It's technically trivial: add a reply-to-list function which looks at List-Post first, and if it exists uses its value (only), otherwise acts like reply-to-sender. As default for _both_ list folders and personal mail, this works over 95% of the time for me, and I participate in a lot of lists where I want to make private replies, or include non-list-members as CCs. For 95% of users, I bet making reply-to-list default would work 99% of the time, and they'd quickly learn to use reply-to-sender and even reply-to-all correctly for the exceptions. Somewhat surprisingly to me, I do not make the mistake of posting private replies to a list (except when Reply-To is being munged, and I've fixed my reply-to- sender function to ignore Reply-To if it points to a list). YMMV, but this really looks plausible to me, and ought to be tried. The only problem is getting lots of people who use broken MUAs to write to their vendors. My list members use sane MUAs, I can't help with this. ;-) -- Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Ask not how you can "do" free software business; ask what your business can "do for" free software. ------------------------------------------------------ Mailman-Users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/