Script to condense the review page

[Skip Montanaro]

I help moderate a couple mailing lists on python.org. The biggest challenge
for me is vetting messages which were held for review. The information
density in the Mailman review page is pretty low, typically showing only two
or three messages per screen. Most of the time all I'm really interested in
are the subject and the disposition buttons. I wrote a script to display
just that information (and set the default disposition to "discard"):

http://www.musi-cal.com/~skip/python/mmfold.py

The subject links to the full review page for that message, so you still
have access to all the bells and whistles available should you want them.

Ideally something like this will be incorporated into Mailman itself, but
for now mmfold.py is a reasonable substitute and should serve as a decent
place to experiment with other ideas.

 

[Neil Hodgson]

Skip Montanaro:

I help moderate a couple mailing lists on python.org. The biggest challenge
for me is vetting messages which were held for review. The information
density in the Mailman review page is pretty low, typically showing only two
or three messages per screen.

On Windows using Mozilla, I had to comment out the os.unlink(htmlfile) as
the file is gone before the browser can open it. Maybe sleep for 5 seconds
before unlinking?

I would like to have a web page that merged all four MailMan lists I
manage together with duplicated messages only appearing once so they can be
removed quickly.

Neil

 

[Skip Montanaro]

Neil> On Windows using Mozilla, I had to comment out the
Neil> os.unlink(htmlfile) as the file is gone before the browser can
Neil> open it. Maybe sleep for 5 seconds before unlinking?

Yeah, I realized that would perhaps be a problem. Windows might be
problematic even with the sleep. Wouldn't the unlink() call fail if the
browser has the file open? (Hopefully it would close it quickly.)

Neil> I would like to have a web page that merged all four MailMan lists
Neil> I manage together with duplicated messages only appearing once so
Neil> they can be removed quickly.

Hack away... ;-)

Skip

 

[Peter Hansen]

Neil> On Windows using Mozilla, I had to comment out the
Neil> os.unlink(htmlfile) as the file is gone before the browser can
Neil> open it. Maybe sleep for 5 seconds before unlinking?

Yeah, I realized that would perhaps be a problem. Windows might be
problematic even with the sleep. Wouldn't the unlink() call fail if the
browser has the file open? (Hopefully it would close it quickly.)

Neil> I would like to have a web page that merged all four MailMan lists
Neil> I manage together with duplicated messages only appearing once so
Neil> they can be removed quickly.

Hack away... ;-)

I'd be happy to hack on it too, as I have two or three lists which
I have to clear out every day or so...

What I don't understand is why I have to do it at all, though.
I've got Mailman configured (near as I can tell) not to allow
*any* posts from non-subscribers. Why should I, as admin, have
to deal with manually rejecting these posts at all?! Most of
them say something about "Spam Assassin thinks this might be spam".
Well, so what? Delete it, period, since it wasn't from a subscriber.

Or am I missing something obvious about how this all works?

-Peter