At 4:13 AM +0100 2006-01-13, Erling Hellenas wrote:
> This is just an idea for an addition I think would be useful. I think that
> normally if you create some piece of information with a computer you should
> also see to that it is taken away when it is no longer needed.
In some cases, that may be appropriate. However, it is totally
inappropriate to assume that this is correct in all cases.
> As I see it everything will get much easier if you have only the active
> users in your databases, instead of having many times that amount of
> inactive people who don't even read the mails.
For most mailing lists, 99.9999% of the subscribership is silent
-- they read, but they never post. In fact, many mailing lists are
announcement-only -- subscribers are not allowed to post, even if
they want to.
On lists where subscribers are allowed to post, if you then force
them to periodically respond to an automated query, you will find
that many of them decide it's not worth the hassle and they will go
somewhere else.
You obviously feel that this feature is desirable for your
purposes, and therefore you want the Mailman developers to add this
functionality. The problem is that Mailman is an open source project
and the developers do not have the time to implement even a small
fraction of the features they consider to be useful, much less the
features that might benefit only a tiny fraction of the community.
Mailman is an open-source project. If you want to add code to
the system to provide such a feature, or arrange for someone else to
do that for you, then you would be welcome to have that code uploaded
to the appropriate page on the SourceForge web site and the Mailman
developers would consider whether or not to use that code (or create
their own code) to add that feature at some point in time in the
future. Otherwise, I wouldn't hold your breath.
I certainly doubt that anyone is going to give this idea any
strong consideration so long as we're still talking about Mailman 2.x
and Python pickles for list data and meta-data storage -- the
additional data storage and operational performance costs would be
too great for far too many lists.
Maybe once we get into Mailman 3 (a.k.a., "MM3") and having a
real back-end database, something like this might be somewhat more
feasible -- although I doubt it would be any more attractive or
broadly useful to the whole community.
--
Brad Knowles, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
-- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755
LOPSA member since December 2005. See <http://www.lopsa.org/>.
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