[OH-Publicity] One weird trick for moderating mailman lists more easily

[Asheesh Laroia]

I wrote some documentation for a tool called "listadmin", and wrote a
toolkit that makes it easy for other OpenHatchy people to use it.

https://github.com/openhatch/oh-listadmin/

I'll copy-paste the README here.

I hope this is useful to other people. I'd love to do what I can to help
others deal with mailman list moderation, for your own lists, or for our
general OpenHatch lists.

-- Asheesh.

P.S. A meta-remark: I read recently that, if your organization has
high-quality internal communication, it is easy to turn that into
high-quality external communication. This notion is a gem.
oh-listadmin

Tools for command-line management and moderation of OpenHatch mailman
lists, based on listadmin by Kjetil Torgrim
Homme<http://heim.ifi.uio.no/kjetilho/hacks/#listadmin>
.

This is what it looks like:

https://asciinema.org/a/7816
General background

This lets you run:

./oh-listadmin

and administer OpenHatch email lists via a simple, low-friction command
line interface.

You can see a sample session that demonstrates listadmin's
features<http://heim.ifi.uio.no/kjetilho/hacks/listadmin-session.html>
.

You can read more about listadmin via its
website<http://heim.ifi.uio.no/kjetilho/hacks/#listadmin>.
(oh-listadmin is a wrapper around listadmin, configuring it for use with
OpenHatch lists.)
Get these files

Make sure you have a copy of this git repository on your computer. One way
to that is:

$ git clone https://github.com/openhatch/oh-listadmin

Now, use "cd" to change directory into it:

$ cd oh-listadmin

Install listadmin

On Debian and Ubuntu systems, you can run:

$ sudo apt-get install listadmin

On other systems, like Mac OS, I am not sure I am not sure. Help is welcome.

To run the Makefile that drives configuration, run:

$ sudo apt-get install make

One-time password configuration

Since OpenHatch email lists have a master password, you need someone to
tell you that password.

Once they tell it to you, run these commands:

$ cp password.template password.private
$ chmod 0600 password.private
$ nano -w password.private

and place the password in this file.

Then run:

$ make

and it will create a listadmin.ini file.
Run the tool

You can run it like so:

$ ./oh-listadmin

Ta-da!
Maintenance

When we want to add new lists to the set of email lists that our lovely
list moderators moderate, we should edit the *listadmin.ini.template* file,
adding the new lists, and then ask the list moderators to run "git pull"
and then "make".
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