blog/data/2014-10-22-listadmin.txt

   1 Title: listadmin, the quick way to moderate mailman lists - nice free software
   2 Tags: english, debian, nice free software
   3 Date: 2014-10-22 20:00
   4
   5 <p>If you ever had to moderate a mailman list, like the ones on
   6 alioth.debian.org, you know the web interface is fairly slow to
   7 operate.  First you visit one web page, enter the moderation password
   8 and get a new page shown with a list of all the messages to moderate
   9 and various options for each email address.  This take a while for
  10 every list you moderate, and you need to do it regularly to do a good
  11 job as a list moderator.  But there is a quick alternative,
  12 <a href="http://heim.ifi.uio.no/kjetilho/hacks/#listadmin">the
  13 listadmin program</a>.  It allow you to check lists for new messages
  14 to moderate in a fraction of a second.  Here is a test run on two
  15 lists I recently took over:</p>
  16
  17 <p><blockquote><pre>
  18 % time listadmin xiph
  19 fetching data for pkg-xiph-commits@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue
  20 fetching data for pkg-xiph-maint@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue
  21
  22 real    0m1.709s
  23 user    0m0.232s
  24 sys     0m0.012s
  25 %
  26 </pre></blockquote></p>
  27
  28 <p>In 1.7 seconds I had checked two mailing lists and confirmed that
  29 there are no message in the moderation queue.  Every morning I
  30 currently moderate 68 mailman lists, and it normally take around two
  31 minutes.  When I took over the two pkg-xiph lists above a few days
  32 ago, there were 400 emails waiting in the moderator queue.  It took me
  33 less than 15 minutes to process them all using the listadmin
  34 program.</p>
  35
  36 <p>If you install
  37 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/listadmin">the listadmin
  38 package</a> from Debian and create a file <tt>~/.listadmin.ini</tt>
  39 with content like this, the moderation task is a breeze:</p>
  40
  41 <p><blockquote><pre>
  42 username username@example.org
  43 spamlevel 23
  44 default discard
  45 discard_if_reason "Posting restricted to members only. Remove us from your mail list."
  46
  47 password secret
  48 adminurl https://{domain}/mailman/admindb/{list}
  49 mailman-list@lists.example.com
  50
  51 password hidden
  52 other-list@otherserver.example.org
  53 </pre></blockquote></p>
  54
  55 <p>There are other options to set as well.  Check the manual page to
  56 learn the details.</p>
  57
  58 <p>If you are forced to moderate lists on a mailman installation where
  59 the SSL certificate is self signed or not properly signed by a
  60 generally accepted signing authority, you can set a environment
  61 variable when calling listadmin to disable SSL verification:</p>
  62
  63 <p><blockquote><pre>
  64 PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=0 listadmin
  65 </pre></blockquote></p>
  66
  67 <p>If you want to moderate a subset of the lists you take care of, you
  68 can provide an argument to the listadmin script like I do in the
  69 initial screen dump (the xiph argument).  Using an argument, only
  70 lists matching the argument string will be processed.  This make it
  71 quick to accept messages if you notice the moderation request in your
  72 email.</p>
  73
  74 <p>Without the listadmin program, I would never be the moderator of 68
  75 mailing lists, as I simply do not have time to spend on that if the
  76 process was any slower. The listadmin program have saved me hours of
  77 time I could spend elsewhere over the years.  It truly is nice free
  78 software.</p>
  79
  80 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
  81 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
  82 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
  83
  84 <p>Update 2014-10-27: Added missing 'username' statement in
  85 configuration example.  Also, I've been told that the
  86 PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=0 setting do not work for everyone.  Not
  87 sure why.</p>