Brock Rozen writes about a point that has bothered me for a long time:
>By nature, list-owners shouldn't be clueless. Yes, I know it's a nice
>thought -- but in order to deal with the list configuration file, they
>have to know something about computers and majordomo.
The problem is that list-owners are selected for their involvement with
the subject, not necessarily for their mastery of computers. My greatest
concern about MD is that list administration is really too complicated
for most of the people who I think should be doing the job, so I end up
managing almost all our lsits myself.
It would be nice if we could identify a core set of basic tools that a
list-owner needs, and facilitate those so that the list-owner can do
just a few essential things, and can let the mail server administrator
handle the rest. For example (damn, I know that Jason will flame me for
this!), it would be great if the list-owner could fire off a command
like
moderate LISTNAME PASSWORD
to impose moderation as soon as junk starts flying through a list,
rather than having to retrieve and modify correctly the entire config
file.
Frankly, when I look at the standard instructions to new list-owners,
most of the time I don't even send them out. Look at the number of
postings we get from MD administrators who can't figure out how to make
noadvertise work, and yet we expect novices to wade through all the
stuff about regexps?
--
Bill Silvert, Habitat Ecology Section, Bedford Institute of Oceanography,
P. O. Box 1006, Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, CANADA B2Y 4A2, Tel. (902)426-1577
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