Postorius Suggestion: Give owner a view of all users of all owned lists
Andreas Vetter writes:
A list of all addresses subscribed to all lists owned by the logged in person.
This is starting to take a better form. It's still very specialized, so I'm starting to wonder if trying to add it to Postorius is a great idea. Of course if people are coming in over the network, you don't want to reproduce all the authentication and authorization logic implemented in Django and Postorius. That may as well be done in Django, and if you're doing Django it may as well be Postorius too.
But if you're in a single sign-on environment so presence in the network implies strong authentication, you will get more flexibility from local scripts using mailmanclient, or if you're confident in security access to the REST API directly. Just putting that out for your consideration, since implementing what is taking shape here would take quite some time as the folks skilled with Postorius are not so active these days.
Owner is the primary target group for that. But since it should be a tool for managing subscriptions in a simple way, it might also be of interest for superusers. For me as a superuser it would make life easier. [...] Ah, I see the problem and agree: So, the presentation should have a sorted and searchable list of addresses and a Button next to each address, maybe labeled "Subscriptions".
Looking at your description above, for superusers that is basically the Users tab, though. Users are identified by primary address, and you'd not see alternate addresses in the list. But presumably your internal users use their @your.org addresses as primary. Can you make clear what could be more streamlined for your use cases as superuser? I give one example below, maybe that's what you're mostly interested in.
The caveats about access to User objects still apply for owners, so even if they look the same (which is a good UX idea if owner functionality is a subset of superuser functionality, also they might even be able to share the basic page templates), the implementation is going to be rather different. I suspect you superusers would be quite frustrated if using the "subscribe all these lists" functionality meant you couldn't get at the User object without going to a different page.
I do see one weird thing: you can't manipulate subscription itself from the User page as seen by the superuser from that list, only toggle moderation and delivery mode. I guess that's reasonable for a lot of use cases, though. I've never wanted to do a subscribe or unsubscribe from there. I always have a long list of users to subscribe to specific lists, never a list of lists a specific user should belong to,
The presentation given when above "Subscriptions" Button is clicked should contain the address as kind of Headline. Then a table of all lists of the logged in owner and next to each mailing list an indication, if the address is subscribed or not and a Button to toggle subscription/unsubscription. May be a single Toggle Button or (maybe better) two buttons, a suscribe and a unsubscribe button, where one is greyed out.
This would not work with the current User page as presented to a superuser, that's true. The current presentation is quite suited to its purpose, with sections for Addresses, Subscriptions, Ownership, and Delete User in that order. But especially for superusers, there are plenty of sites with thousands, even tens of thousands of lists, and even a paged or scrollable presentation would be awful UI, and the potential for a disastrous mistake using "do all" is high.
In addition my owners would like to have a "unsubscribe from all my lists" button. And a "subscribe to all my lists" button. This might be visually nicer, when having the two-button approach above.
I wonder if your owners really want "subscribe all". "Unsubscribe all" does make sense for separations, of course, and they wouldn't necessarily be terminations. It would be useful in an internal transfer where "delete user" is not a solution. But in my experience specialized channels tend to proliferate but the same people are likely to be running them as run the department-wide lisst.
In our case we would want to (un-)subscribe the address in a "do it, don't ask anyone" fashion, but maybe this is not a good idea in general. What do you think?
I think we would implement it similarly to the mass subscribe for multiple addresses case, where the list owner can decide how much bureaucracy to require of the subscriber. You'd want to be careful to make sure address verification is done at most once (for your use case, probably not at all). And there would be some things that could be done to arrange that most lists would have sensible defaults.
Yes, I agree, but policy here is to get rid of subdomains, and that falls on our feet now.
Well, once we figure out how to implement domain ownership, it wouldn't be hard to adapt that technology to "departments" that are administratively distinct but share mail and/or web domains. The main problem would be deciding whether and how to nest them. Superuser > domain owner > list owner > moderator is pretty obvious, but how "department owner" would fit in is less so.
Stephen, after thinking a lot about it, I came up with this.
Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
Andreas Vetter writes:
A list of all addresses subscribed to all lists owned by the logged in person.
This is starting to take a better form. It's still very specialized, so I'm starting to wonder if trying to add it to Postorius is a great idea. Of course if people are coming in over the network, you don't want to reproduce all the authentication and authorization logic implemented in Django and Postorius. That may as well be done in Django, and if you're doing Django it may as well be Postorius too.
But if you're in a single sign-on environment so presence in the network implies strong authentication, you will get more flexibility from local scripts using mailmanclient, or if you're confident in security access to the REST API directly. Just putting that out for your consideration, since implementing what is taking shape here would take quite some time as the folks skilled with Postorius are not so active these days.
I agree, this is very special. In our case we will cook it down to a very special solution providing owners with the info they need. Based on that, they can use the unchanged postorius for (un-)subscribing.
Owner is the primary target group for that. But since it should be a tool for managing subscriptions in a simple way, it might also be of interest for superusers. For me as a superuser it would make life easier.
[...]
Ah, I see the problem and agree: So, the presentation should have a sorted and searchable list of addresses and a Button next to each address, maybe labeled "Subscriptions".
Looking at your description above, for superusers that is basically the Users tab, though. Users are identified by primary address, and you'd not see alternate addresses in the list. But presumably your internal users use their @your.org addresses as primary. Can you make clear what could be more streamlined for your use cases as superuser? I give one example below, maybe that's what you're mostly interested in.
The caveats about access to User objects still apply for owners, so even if they look the same (which is a good UX idea if owner functionality is a subset of superuser functionality, also they might even be able to share the basic page templates), the implementation is going to be rather different. I suspect you superusers would be quite frustrated if using the "subscribe all these lists" functionality meant you couldn't get at the User object without going to a different page.
I do see one weird thing: you can't manipulate subscription itself from the User page as seen by the superuser from that list, only toggle moderation and delivery mode. I guess that's reasonable for a lot of use cases, though. I've never wanted to do a subscribe or unsubscribe from there. I always have a long list of users to subscribe to specific lists, never a list of lists a specific user should belong to,
We have a list for almost every working group and have scripts reading members from there and putting them together in the higher level lists. People can be in more than one working group list. Users come, stay some years and go, so mass (un-)subscription is used for single addresses usually. But if the owner forgets to delete someone from a list, the person is still in one of the higher "automatic" lists. So an overview would have been nice. The "(un-)subscribe all" buttons are not really needed in our use case. We run about 300 lists. For a superuser this is a lot, given the fact there is no filtering in the table of lists.
A owner wants to see in an address view all his lists. A superuser does not, because it would be too much unrelevant information (e.g all 200 research lists, when user is in finance).
As a superuser I could need in the users view:
- clicking on a list name to manage the list
- unsubscribe button
The presentation given when above "Subscriptions" Button is clicked should contain the address as kind of Headline. Then a table of all lists of the logged in owner and next to each mailing list an indication, if the address is subscribed or not and a Button to toggle subscription/unsubscription. May be a single Toggle Button or (maybe better) two buttons, a suscribe and a unsubscribe button, where one is greyed out.
This would not work with the current User page as presented to a superuser, that's true. The current presentation is quite suited to its purpose, with sections for Addresses, Subscriptions, Ownership, and Delete User in that order. But especially for superusers, there are plenty of sites with thousands, even tens of thousands of lists, and even a paged or scrollable presentation would be awful UI, and the potential for a disastrous mistake using "do all" is high. I agree. So I think superusers "users view" and owners "addresses view" should be different things.
In addition my owners would like to have a "unsubscribe from all my lists" button. And a "subscribe to all my lists" button. This might be visually nicer, when having the two-button approach above.
I wonder if your owners really want "subscribe all". "Unsubscribe all" does make sense for separations, of course, and they wouldn't necessarily be terminations. It would be useful in an internal transfer where "delete user" is not a solution. But in my experience specialized channels tend to proliferate but the same people are likely to be running them as run the department-wide lisst.
Yes, "subscribe all" is usually not wanted, I just mentioned it for symmetry. Since we populate higher lists with members from lower lists by script, we would not strictly need "unsubscribe all" as long as the owner knows which lists are populated automatic. We currently hide that info in the short description of the list. Everything very special, I agree.
In our case we would want to (un-)subscribe the address in a "do it, don't ask anyone" fashion, but maybe this is not a good idea in general. What do you think?
I think we would implement it similarly to the mass subscribe for multiple addresses case, where the list owner can decide how much bureaucracy to require of the subscriber. You'd want to be careful to make sure address verification is done at most once (for your use case, probably not at all). And there would be some things that could be done to arrange that most lists would have sensible defaults. Yes, this is and was a problem for us. We imported many lists from mailman2. Some settings have to be changed after migration, and a mailman config command to set settings for lists would be great. Or a way to permanently create new list styles.
Yes, I agree, but policy here is to get rid of subdomains, and that falls on our feet now.
Well, once we figure out how to implement domain ownership, it wouldn't be hard to adapt that technology to "departments" that are administratively distinct but share mail and/or web domains. The main problem would be deciding whether and how to nest them. Superuser > domain owner > list owner > moderator is pretty obvious, but how "department owner" would fit in is less so.
I already had this wo possibilities here (at different times): In fact a department owner could own several domains. The department research (as opposed to e.g. administration) could contain biology.example.org and physics.example.org). Would it harm to be owner of several domains?
Or it could be the other way round (physics.uni.edu has a theory department and an experiment department, each having chairs with the list owners).
So there is no single way. Department owner and domain owner seem to be roles on the same level with different funcionality. Superuser has to decide how to use it.
-- Mit freundlichen Gruessen, Andreas Vetter
participants (2)
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Andreas Vetter -
Stephen J. Turnbull