[Imc-tech] List Admins

[Zachary C.Miller]

Three people stepped forward to help with the list
administration. Paul Riismandel, Eric Cain, and Bryan Cribbs. Rather
than pick one of them or have them duke it out I have just made all of
them list admins. They can decide amongst themselves who should be the
primary admin and who are the backups or however they want to split up
the task.

I will email them the list admin password in a separate email. I am
going to document the list admin job here so that people can refer
back to this email in teh archives when we have new list admins in the
future.

It should also be noted that Sascha Meinrath and Pauline Bartolome are
on the admin lists for a few different lists. If there are people from
various focus groups who want to help admin their particular focus
group's list this would be great and any of the global list admins
(Eric, Bryan, or Paul) can add them to that group's list's admin list.

I will still be in charge of creating new lists and giving technical
support to the list admins but everything else is now in the hands of
Paul, Eric, and Bryan. 

Anyone can send a message to imc-admin at urbana.indymedia.org if they
want to get to all of them at once.

The list admin pages are at: 
http://lists.groogroo.com/cgi-bin/admin/

Just click on the list you want to administer and it will prompt you
for a password. Then you will be taken to the admin page for that
list. There are many options and links to pages with other
options. Everything is documented so you can always click "Details" by
any option to learn what that option means. I suggest that new admins
explore all the options on all the Configuration Categories and learn
what they all do (without changing any settings of course). 

By being on the list admin list you will occasionally get one of three
kinds of emails, each of which you have to respond to:

1) Pending list administration request - some message has been held up
for moderation and you have to decide whether to Accept it (which
sends it to the list in question), Reject it (which does not send it
and sends a short note of explanation to the original author telling
them what the problem was), or Discard it (which drops the message
without notifying the original author).

The main reasons a message will be help up is because it is too long
(typically >40kB), it has an implicit destination, or it has too many
recipients.

The message is usually too long because someone is trying to send an
attachment to the list. A lot of users can't view attachments or would
be hindered on their dialup connnection if they were forced to down
load a large attachment. I almost always reject these messages with a
polite note to the sender suggesting alternative ways they can get
their data out. For meeting minutes, converting them to text and then
sending is the best option. For flyers, posting them to the web is the
best way.

Some groups (currently imc-outreach is the only one) may internally
choose that they all want to be able to share attachments of large
files because they understand the consequences and the group is very
small. You can disable the file size bound on the main administrative
page by changing the setting called "Maximum length in Kb of a message
body." Just change that setting to 0 and there will be no limit.

Messages with implicit destinations are usually messages sent to many
different people via Bcc. Often this is plain old spam and those
should be discarded. Other times it is very relevent announcements
from some local organization. In this latter case the messages can be
accepted and posted right to the list despite their implicit destination.

Too many recipients is when someone sents to a bunch of different
lists all at once. This can cause a lot of problems if someone else
then does a reply to all on that original message and doesn't realize
they are replying to many different lists and probably a lot more
people than they think. You just need to use your best judgement on
this. Usualy I reject the message and tell the original sender to
resend the message with the imc list as the only recipient. 

2) Bounce message

Any time a random subscriber to the list has a list message to them
bounce you will get the bounce notification (the sender of the message
will not get this notification). You can look at the bounce message
and decide whether or not to unsubscribe the person or not. Or you can
simply ignore the message and after 5-10 of them come through in a
short period of time the system will usually automatically unsubscribe
them (see the "Bounce Options" on the admin pages). 

3) User requests

Any user can send a message to listname-admin at lists.groogroo.com and
it will go to all the admins of that list. These will often be people
who need help subscribing or who want off the list and don't know how
to unsubscribe. Take care of the requests as appropriate.

Most member requests can be handled via the "Membership Management"
admin page. To unsubscribe people just uncheck the box by their
address. To subscribe them go down to the "mass subscribe members"
section and put their address in the text box. Always submit the form
after you make changes.

-- 
Zachary C. Miller - @= - http://wolfgang.groogroo.com/
Today (Friday, May 25) is Towel Day - http://www.towelday.org