On Mar 12, 2014, at 01:43 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote: >Offhand I'd say that having both a Member rule and a NonMember rule is >a bad idea. There should be one conceptual test: can we identify a >member as the originator of this post? Having Member and NonMember >rules that can both "succeed" is not coherent.
I agree, in theory, but there are two reasons I split these. At first there was only a membership rule, and the non-member rule was added later. But more importantly, there *is* an implicit ordering, not through the rules (which there can't be), but through the chain in which these rules are links, specifically the default-posting-chain. Rules either hit or miss, they are pure binary tests. By side-effect, both the member rule and non-member rule set two message metadata keys, 'moderation_action' and 'moderation_sender', and of course the two rules set them differently depending on the defaults and such. It's the moderation chain that looks at these metadata keys and actually performs the moderation action *if* the rule hits. The moderation chain can be jumped to if the member moderation rule hits, which happens early in the chain, or the non-member rule hits, which happens later in the chain. Think of it like this: if the membership rule hits (i.e. the sender is a member), then we can (but don't necessarily have to) bypass checks like administrivia or implicit destination. This might be the case if I were to configure my list to say "All messages sent by Steve should be accepted without question". By default, we'll probably defer if the membership test hits, so that we normally do perform the other rule checks. Toward the end of the chain, we do the non-member check. Let say the message has passed all other rules and it would normally be okay to post, but it comes from a non-member. If the rule hits, we'll again jump to the moderation chain, taking whatever action is appropriate. Usually this will be the default non-member action, but we could potentially do something else, like say "Even though Alice isn't a member of this list, we've seen her posts before and they are on-topic, so let's accept them", or "Bob is a spammer, always discard his messages". The default posting chain has one final link, which has the 'truth' rule (i.e. it always matches). Thus let's say that the poster is a member with a deferred posting action, and none of the other rules hit, so his message gets sent to the 'accept' chain where it is accepted for posting and gets further processed. The same ultimate result could happen if the poster is a non-member, but the default non-member rule is to accept posts from anybody. I'm having a hard time right now seeing how we could continue to support these types of operations with a combined member and non-member rule. I *think* the right solution may be to continue to keep the rules separate, but add an extra check to the nonmember-moderation rule, such that if any of the senders are members, then the rule cannot hit, i.e. the sender is definitely not a non-member. A quick look at Aurélien's patch seems about the right way to do it. I'll hold off on reviewing and merging it though, to get any additional feedback you might have. Cheers, -Barry _______________________________________________ Mailman-Developers mailing list Mailman-Developers@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-developers Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-developers%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-developers/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9
