Syndicate: bureau automation

[Frederic Madre <fmadre@wanadoo.fr>]

greets!

I jump into the debate of automatic filtering and/or administration because this is a subject that I gave a long thought about right after I ultimately closed the palais-tokyo list.

At the time, I thought that it would be so nice to have the system being able to do chores like limiting the number of posts by list member or, exactly like nn described, having the possibility to choose multiple criteria channels from a huge unthreaded mess of list mail. This is why I had already begun to use whatever possibility there was with the mailman admin interface to achieve what could be achieved w/o programming: limiting the size of a single post, forbidding posts that had more than 2 recipients (to refrain x-posting), disallowing posts from non-members while authorising spam machines, etc

It did not work. I mean, it did not achieve what I wanted which prompted me to ask myself better what I wanted.

So I came up with even more refined ideas for automatic administrative processing. I visioned a web page with the list of members and columns of properties and one could choose its preferred language, max number of posts per day (to you or from one other member), etc

We had some talk about it with my good friends of x-arn.org and d2b.org, maybe porculus too.

Suddenly it grabbed me that the multiplication of automatic processes was in fact just a cheap cop-out for moderation (a process that you all know I abhor and, yes, consider as fascistic) and that it was even worse and too facile on the mind to just tick a few boxes in an interface to actually get rid of a person. voila, sublime technocracy!

Let me tell you, as an aside, that I never use mail filters because I do not mind stuff filling my inbox (and subfolders for which I have filters as a sorting facility) and more importantly I believe that somebody may be boring me today (and that might very well be because of my frame of mind at the time, not his) but someday s/he will _certainly come up with something that I fancy.

Anyway, I am still very much interested in using mail thru-put as raw matter for something else but not for list admin because I truly feel that an ml should rule itself, or die. Still, I had abandoned the tweakings because we found out that it was quite difficult to develop the channeling processes we dreamt of on top of something like mailman. I imagined that the first thing would be to design a relational database and on top of it the application, but I had not gone as far as nn's idea which is to develop also the client part: that does open up possibilities massively and i'd _love to participate in such a project, yes please.

but, to sum it up, I believe that such software would not be able to replace the useful and, dare I say, homey feel of a traditional mailing list running on vintage majordomo with people directly
out there.

salut et fraternit?,
f.


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