Re: Mailman's Approval Duties Denied Me.

[Bob Proulx]

Hello Ralph,

Ralph Corderoy wrote:
> I'm list admin. for nmh-{announce,commits,address@hidden  There
> are no moderators.  In particular, I removed that `helpers' address for
> the all-list moderators a while ago because I wanted to see what needed
> doing.

Okay.  Noted.

I think it is a lot of work that is otherwise automated though. :-)

> I recently received these two emails.
> 
>     Date: Sun, 07 Jan 2018 00:27:47 -0500
>     From: address@hidden
>     Subject: Nmh-commits post from address@hidden requires approval
>     Message-ID: <address@hidden>
> 
>     Date: Sun, 07 Jan 2018 00:27:48 -0500
>     From: address@hidden
>     Subject: Nmh-workers post from address@hidden requires approval
>     Message-ID: <address@hidden>
>
> When I went to attend to these just now, they were gone. Neither list
> had anything to do.

Yep.  That will happen because the listhelper team will do it.  :-)

> Is some third-party helper still being `helpful'?
> :-)

Yes.  Since we didn't know any better those messages were almost
certainly either approved or discarded by the listhelper team.

I'll add those lists to the hands-off list and then no one will be
helping with those lists again.

> Or perhaps these held messages get automatically purged on quite a
> short timescale so I was too late in coming along some eight or nine
> hours later?  Though `max_days_to_hold' is zero days, no discard, for
> both.

There are 1,500+ mailing lists at lists.{non}gnu.org for all kinds of
things.  At one time each list was left to its own.  As you can
imagine that meant that a thousand of those lists were never
maintained.  In response to that about ten years ago we rolled up all
of the lists into one management bucket.  Now we have the listhelper
team who looks over the entire set all together and will clean spam
off of them and approve valid messages and so forth as appropriate for
the entire collection of lists.

This means that for the most part mailing list owners don't really
need to do anything and the mailing lists will not have spam on them
and will have valid messages approved through them without all of the
owners needing to do very much work.  That is what most people want.

The listhelper stuff is described in some detail here:

  https://savannah.gnu.org/maintenance/ListHelperAntiSpam/

I have marked your mailing lists as hands-off.  They will no longer
appear in our work queues when looking for messages needing attention.

Let us know if you want to add the lists back into the listhelper
system. :-)

Bob