Re: GNOME list admin/moderation seperation

[Ross Golder <ross golder org>]

On จ., 2005-01-31 at 08:04 -0800, Gregory Leblanc wrote:
> This certainly sounds good, though I'm not sure I see it actually 
> happening.  The time savings I see from having more moderators is not so 
> much from having fewer individual mails to review, as that takes very 
> little time, but from having fewer lists that need to have the queue 
> cleared every X hours.  If you can find folks who will sign up, and 
> check in on their lists at a specific time each day, this might actually 
> work out.  As for me, I've been doing it "when I have time," which is 
> never at the same time two times in a row, let alone two days in a row.

Some people (inc myself) don't have a solid, regular daily schedule, and
tend to do things as they get round to them. However, there are still a
lot of people out there that know they'll be sat at their computer at
some point early-mid morning every day, stirring their coffee, checking
their e-mail and not quite ready to start any real work until they've
woken up a bit.

> 
> I've found that, on my fairly decent computer, it takes me > 30 minutes 
> to get to all of the moderator reqests, even if there are only a dozen 
> or so per list.  Most of my time is really spent waiting for browser 
> windows to spawn, and for the pages to actually load after I enter the 
> mailman password.  I've found that the upper limit of my tolerances is 
> about 5-6 lists at a time.  More than that becomes tedious.  If I only 
> have 2 or 3 lists to do, I usually don't bother, as it will end up being 
> faster for me to wait until there are 5 lists, so that the 'overhead' 
> gets spread out a bit more.
> 

I know what you mean. My laptop (a low-end Compaq Celeron!) isn't all
that (my laptop died - borrowing a friends until I can afford a new
one), and most of my time is spent waiting for browser windows, and in
my case the RTT on a busy 56k line, which is another reason I was hoping
to find to people with better equipment and connectivity to help pick up
the slack.

I was hoping to get into python a bit by patching mailman a bit to make
this task even easier. For example - it'd be a lot easier if you only
had to log in once, and that cookie let you into any other lists on the
same server with the same password. That'd cut a large part of the
overhead out. The same thing would be nice when using the mailman site
password - it's very annoying having to type that in 10+ times a day!

> >If you, or anyone you know, is able to spare a few minutes a day to help
> >out the GNOME list moderator team (and to help save me a few minutes a
> >day), please pretty please drop me an e-mail.
> >
> I can still do "spot checks," but likely am not organized enough to 
> commit to doing things at a specific time every day.  Later,
>     Greg
> 

Thanks for the offer. The team was 3-strong as of yesterday (thanks Kurt
and Toni), and I've had a few more volunteers in this morning's e-mail,
all of whom are currently GNOME list admins already, so I think we have
enough for now. For now, you (and the other members of 'gnome-sysadmin')
will still see moderator stuff coming through via 'gnome-listadmin'.
Just keeping an eye on those and making sure they don't get out of hand
is help enough.

Eventually, I'll start adding 'moderator gnome org' to lists owned only
by 'gnome-listadmin'. When that's done, I'll configure (/patch) mailman
to send moderator traffic only to the moderator request, if one is set.
I think it currently copies it to the owner too, which isn't really
necessary if there is a moderator.

Cheers,

--
Ross