[theforum] [Fwd: Feedback: Comment Notification]

David Kaufman david at gigawatt.com
Sun Oct 22 00:18:51 CDT 2006


Hi Dean,

Dean Mah <dmah at shaw.ca> wrote:
> The contact link is pointless since the e-mails are being
> automatically discarded.  Also the 'Issues' link is broken.

Yikes!

That's my fault.  I set the content list (*all* of the evolt lists, in 
fact!) to discard (instead of hold) posts from non-members about two 
weeks after taking over your listmaster duties.  I simply found it 
pointless and did not have the time to manually review and discard all 
the spam messages that arrive from unsubscribed addresses for each list 
each each day, especially using mailman's klunky we interface.

The fact that feedback messages from the site are forwarded by drupal to 
the content list, with their from address set (forged actually, the 
senders did not send us mail) is something I should  have realized (or 
asked about!) before taking this action.  Such messages were infrequent 
enough that I hadn't realized that the "normal" procedure for content 
members to read and reply to them involved mailman blocking the message, 
holding it along with the spam, and waiting for a list moderator to sift 
through the accumulated messages, discarding the spam and allowing the 
feedback messages to pass onward to the list.

I've remedied the situation for now by re-enabling the "hold messages 
from non-subscribers".  Long term I'd prefer to modify the contact-form 
processor (a drupal PHP script, I presume?) to forward these messages to 
the list *not* from the address enetered into the form by the visitor, 
but "from" a less well-known (perhaps even downright obscure!) address 
so that feedback messages can be auto-accepted to the content list 
without the delay (and, with me managing the lists, liklihood of human 
error!) that resulted from having them land in a pond full of scum, out 
of which I must fish them and forwarded them with any measure of 
promptitude.

Sorry for the cavalier action on my part, but being a perl programmer, 
my laziness and hubris can be fairly evident...

-dave 




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