Mailman sucks

GNU Mailman kinda sucks, but like democracy I’ve yet to come across something better. ;)

A few things I’d really like to see improved:

• Web archive links in footer

  I find I fairly commonly read something on a list and then want to discuss it with other folks in chat. To point them at the same message I was reading, I have to pull up the web archives, then poke around to find it, then copy the link.

  In an ideal world, the message footer could include a link to the same message on the web archives, and I could just copy and paste.

• Thread moderation

  It should be easy to place an out-of-control thread on moderation. I’ll be honest, I can’t figure out how to do it right now. There’s _spam_ filtering, but we discard that. There’s whole-list moderation. There’s per-user moderation. But how do you moderate a particular thread?

• Throttling

  In some cases, a simple time-delay throttle can help calm things down without actually forcing a moderator to sit there and approve messages. It can feel “fairer” too, since you’re not singling out That One Guy Who Keeps Posting In That One Thread.

• Easy archive excision

  On public mailing lists, sometimes people post private information accidentally (phone numbers in the signature, private follow-up accidentally sent to list, etc) which they then ask to be removed from the archives. People can understandably get a bit worked up over privacy issues, particularly when the Google-juice of a wikimedia.org domain bumps the message to the first Google hit for their name. ;)

  Unfortunately it’s a huge pain in the ass to excise a message from the archives in mailman. You have to shut down the mailing list service, edit a multi-megabyte text file with all that month’s messages, carefully so you don’t disturb the message numbering, rebuild the HTML archive pages from the raw files, and then, finally, restart the mailman service. That’s a lot of manual work and some service outage balanced against having people scream at you, arguably justifiably, and for now we’ve ended up simply disabling crawler access to the archives to keep them out of high-ranked global search indexes. (I know you disagree with this, Timwi. It’s okay, we still love you!)

  If we could strike a message from the archives in a one-touch operation, the way we can unsubscribe someone who can’t figure out the unsubscribe directions, we could switch those crawlers back on and make it easier to search the list.

• Integrated archive search

  We’ve experimented with the htdig integration patch, but the search results are not terribly good and the indexing performance is too slow on our large archives. Even if we get Google etc going again, it’d be nice to have an integrated search that’s a little more polished.