Listwork Todo - Projects and Proposals

Introduction

This page was created to list proposals, projects and other stuff that listwork people should implement.

Non-listworkers proposals

We listworkers live in a bubble and need to grab some ideas from the people that live out there in the real world. So, if you have a couple ideas about things (tools, etc) you'd like to see on your lists, please tell us. You can write here or drop us a line at listwork (at) indymedia (dit) org - don't be shy, all ideas are welcome.

• Some nice ideas about avoiding spam on usenet can be found at http://spam.abuse.net/adminhelp/news.shtml
• [your idea here]

Top of the stack

Things we want to see soon:

• Modifications related to Spam:
  • spamassassin Bayesian learning patch for the mailman admin interface;
  • Spam button in the admindb interface: so that admins can mark some e-mails as spam and feed them into the bayesian learner;
  • Per-list spamassassin parameters: allow admins to choose to use SA with funny params;
  • Spamtrap is back: forward SA-discarded e-mails to a global mailling list, this may help figure if SA goes foobar;
  • Spambots intoxicators: put random e-mails addresses in archived posts to intoxicate e-mail harvesting bots;

• Add a a site-wide config to reject posts to non administered mailling lists, allow for exceptions to that (to avoid shit with a spamtrap list actually, there should be no exception, dammit);
• maybe related? a patch to automatically discard mail after x days held -- can be configured site-wide or per-list: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=790494&group_id=103&atid=300103 this can help deal with the situation of lists where the admins stop dealing with the list, or just don't want to deal with the queue for whatever reason (announcement list, etc)
• make some multilingual categories page. ListworkCategoryTranslation, this isnt ready for prime time, will prolly fall from the top of the stack;
• Add a link to the CAcert root certificate? Perhaps in the footer?
• Would be cool to have our splash page with a clickable map and a couple icons instead of a scary list of hundred of lines... There is an example here -- doesn't work, it's just a toy;

• Implement an auto-reply thingy for graveyarded and non-existent lists. It would be nice to return friendly multilingual errors instead of a standard postfix error. See Ana's message.

Projects & TODO

• implement epsas code for alias management
• search the list archives: http://sarai.indymedia.org/~jb/search.cgi
• migrate to a different archiver (lurker, mhonarc etc) - ansti working on this
• OffSiteLists - a page of indymedia lists that are not on sarai (in preparation for the off-site-lists patch being restored) - patrick was working on this
• ListWorkInformation - a page that explains listwork stuff to visitors of http://lists.indymedia.org
• mailing lists request tracker queue
• sarai request tracker queue
• find AbandonedLists and bury them

Proposals

• Change the text the appears on the top of lists.indymedia.org. two proposals were made, one by alster and another by pabs. pabs didn't know about aslter's proposal and will do a thrid one to combine both proposals. This will need a mailman patch.
• organize policy stuff that listwork needs to decide on in set of smaller tasks
• ListWorkProposalFromPoa - listwork policy proposal
• install clamav (anti-virus software) onto sarai

Ongoing work

• List maintenance (deletion, addition, modification)
• Archive modification (removal of sensitive info)
• Alias maintenance (deletion, addition, modification)
• Software maintenance (upgrade mailman whenever debian releases a new version)
• Patch maintenance (upgrade the patches we use for each mailman release)
• Keep an eye on the backup scripts
• Reply to all non-spam messages on the email list
• Keep and eye on lazy admins that let thousands of messages pending - see also ListworkMessageTranslations. Currently testing bin/warn_pending

Done

• automate choice of language
• This is done, please see http://docs.indymedia.org/view/Sysadmin/SaraiInfo#Backup_Info for details. We need to find an alternative location for the backups however.
• translate text from newlist.indy - a request to imc-translations asking for this to be translated was sent. We will need to take whatever translations we get and put them up so that browsers configured for particular languages will load that language's version of the page.
• create script for enabling language choice in newlist
• modify newlist script
• sarai overhaul, includes internationalization (MicahA, jibe, deanna, gimpboy, pietro)
• remove links to full raw archive mboxes (these are not anti-spammed) and chmod go-rw these mboxes mailman FAQ04.034 - done with upgrade to 2.1.4
• Old lists deleted or graveyarded that have public archives;

• Add Chris' X-Archived-At header;
• Fix the archives renumering bug;
• Add a 'hide' button in the admin interface: delete the appropriate file, schedule an "arch --wipe" and skip hidden posts.

-- PietroFerrari - 13 Jan 2004