[Usability] GNOME list moderator service

[Ross Golder <ross golder org>]

Hi,

I'm sending this e-mail to all owners of a mailing list on
'mail.gnome.org'. I've been thinking of ways to improve the GNOME
mailman service, in particular, how to make list moderation easier for
list owners, and the GNOME sysadmin team.

Currently, many of the lists are owned (or co-owned) by
'gnome-listadmin gnome org', which is an alias to
'gnome-sysadmin gnome org'. Yes, the GNOME sysadmins also get tons of
mailman moderator requests every day, and a whole batch of daily
reminders too. I've noticed, from watching the flood of daily reminders
over the last few months, that the number of moderator requests for some
lists just keeps going up - i.e. the real list owners are failing to
moderate their list, so in some cases it's being left to the
'gnome-listadmin' co-owner (the sysadmins!). Every now and then, I spend
a while going through them, and have mostly managed to keep the number
of outstanding requests per list down to less than triple figures, but
as 'gnome-listadmin' is not the (co)-owner for all the lists, there are
possibly still some lists whose moderation queue had grown by several
months.

I figured that what we need is for all of the moderator requests to be
directed to a small 'moderator team', a number of people in different
timezones whose responsibility is to respond to the moderator requests
each morning for their timezone. This is intended to remove the
moderator burden from the list owner who may already be overburdened
with development duties. It also acts to ensure that there is a
reasonable response time for genuine requests, so people don't send
important mail to a list only for it to be sucked into a rotting
moderator queue. It also means that 'gnome-listadmin' (the sysadmins)
can be relieved of much of the daily moderation trivia.

So, if you would like the moderator team to moderate your list for you,
please set the moderator field for your list(s) to 'moderator gnome org'
and remove any reference to 'gnome-listadmin gnome org' from the owner
field. I would propose doing this step automatically, but there may be
some lists for which moderation might not be appropriate, and/or some
list admins might prefer to moderate their own lists. Please also send a
brief note to 'moderator gnome org' so that I can maintain a 'list of
moderated lists' and so I can set a moderator password for your list,
which will be known to the moderator team.

Currently, the moderator team is just me, so moderation requests will be
dealt with once a day (most days anyway), until I can find more
volunteers. If you, or anyone you know can spare a few minutes a day to
deal with a few moderation requests, please contact me. People in
uncommon timezones would be ideal ;)

For more details on this hare-brained scheme, this e-mail was based on a
similar one I sent earlier to gnome-infrastructure:

http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-infrastructure/2005-January/msg00015.html

Regards,

--
Ross