posts from non email subscribers remain

[David Beaumont]

posts to our forum from people not subscribed to our email list seem to be accepted and also seem to remain e.g. http://www.nabble.com/Legal-stuff-when-buying-a-barge-from-Holland--to14364464s25109r0.html

Can we stop this as they generate replies by genuinely subscribed users which send emails to our subscrribers who will never have received the original, leading to confusion all round and an irritated administrator.

[Denis V <Nabble>]

We cannot prevent from posting only those not subscribed to your mailing list because we don't know the list of your subscribers, and even if we knew, this feature is not supported by Nabble yet.

When we send a post as a message to a mailing list on poster's behalf, we assign a post a pending status. You can see it on the picture:



When we get this message back from the list, we clear this flag.

We can make your archive readonly, thus making it impossible to post to your list via Nabble to anybody. But we believe that posting via Nabble is quite useful feature and it is used widely by our users. For example, the reply post to the pending one was made via Nabble. Are you sure you want to disable it for your list?

[David Beaumont]

I am aware of the pending status and am glad to discover you clear that flag when you get the message back.  For non subscribeed members you will never get the message back and the pending status will stay forever.   Why can't you simply delete pending posts automatically after 24 hours?  That will achieve the desired result.  

No we don't want to stop all users from posting via nabble, only those who are not subscribed to the mailing list.

As I said without this we get email replies to posts that our email subscribers have never seen. Not to mention posts on Nabble from peope who are not subscribed.  

Anyway I will raise this as a feature request.

[Denis V <Nabble>]

Sorry for a long delay in replying to your message. We have been discussing the issue you pointed out, we will return to this thread when we decide it.

[David Beaumont]

thanks.  Any news on this one?

David

[oioi]

I agree with David, deleting posts pending would be beneficial.  Possibly delete on receipt of a bounce message?

Mike

[Hugo Teixeira <Nabble>]

Hi David,

We have been discussing this implementation internally. Soon you will be able to select which users are authorized to post a message in your forum through Nabble's web site. You will have to add one by one to the authorized list. How many users do you think your community has?

Also, this implementation will be available only on Nabble2.
See: http://n2.nabble.com/nabble2.html

Please let us know what you think and if you want to migrate your forum to Nabble2.

Regards,
Hugo Teixeira
Nabble.com

[David Beaumont]

Good as this is a serious problem for us and Nabble seemed to have taken a step backwards with it.

Just to clarifry what we need is auto deletion of posts sent by people who have not subscribed to our email list, to which Nabble is integrated.  If we can auto email the rejectees the reason too - i.e. 'subscribe to the email list please', that will help.

What I don't want to do (and won't be doing) is to have to manually add everyone (700 people approxc) who is already subscribed to our email list to your proposed authorisation  list.  In fact I don't really see the point of an authorised list, I can't envisage circumstances in which we would authorise posters who have not subscribed to our email list.  

On Nabble 2 it is a bit like the last 'embedded enhancement' - we were very happy with what we had, why would we want to change. If it aint broke don't fix it.   Incidentally I never found out if I did change skins etc  to embedded, I thought I did but it kept asking me and always prefixed it with "if you haven't already..". If you don't know I don't.  

Thanks

David

[Will L <Nabble>]

David, suppose a guy is googling boat stuff, wonders into a DBA thread which seems really interesting to him, and he wants to participate in the discussion, which of the following do you want him to experience:

1. He spends some time writing a post. He is not a DBA member. His post never gets forwarded, becomes pending for a day, deleted. Do you want that to happen to him? The biggest benefit of having an online archive of your mailing list is that new users will find the content in your amazing forum and join you and enlarge your group. If his post gets deleted, of course he will lose, but you lose a potential member too.

2. He sees a notice, telling him only member can post in this forum. He clicks a link to request to become a member. You get the requests and approves him as a member. You add him to the list. Then you click a link to send him a notice that he is already a member. Then he makes a post.

I would choose 2. Because the poor guy doesn't waste time composing a post which may or may not get accepted, and could even get deleted. Plus, you get a chance to grow your membership.

#2 is the new feature that we will have.

As for adding people to the authorized list - it's not like you need to add them one by one. There will be a textbox which you can dump your current subscriber list into it. The email list is actually already in our database, so we could do it on our end too. But it's better to give you the control, so you can decide when to add or remove.

[David Beaumont]

Will L <Nabble> wrote:

David, suppose a guy is googling boat stuff, wonders into a DBA thread which seems really interesting to him, and he wants to participate in the discussion, which of the following do you want him to experience:

1. He spends some time writing a post. He is not a DBA member. His post never gets forwarded, becomes pending for a day, deleted. Do you want that to happen to him?

This is preferable to him sending a post that never reaches most of our members who use email, but later a member replies to the nabble post and that does reach our email members except that they have no idea what the original post was as they have never seen it.  It just causes confusion. Why can't we delete the post from the forum, send it back to him and ask him to subscribe to the email list and re-submit?

 The biggest benefit of having an online archive of your mailing list is that new users will find the content in your amazing forum and join you and enlarge your group. If his post gets deleted, of course he will lose, but you lose a potential member too.

We already have a notice, in bold big letters, see below

2. He sees a notice, telling him only member can post in this forum.

yes we already have this at the top of the forum page:  "IMPORTANT: You must subscribe to the DBA Main mailing list for your message to be accepted.  "

He clicks a link to request to become a member.

yes we already have this, the second half of the message is a link to join our email list

You get the requests and approves him as a member.

yes we already have this, the second half of the message is a link to join our email list

You add him to the list.

yes we already have this, the second half of the message is a link to join our email list

Then you click a link to send him a notice that he is already a member.

What?  why? He automatically gets the membership confirmation from our email list

Then he makes a post.

yes we already have this

I would choose 2.

yes we already have this

Because the poor guy doesn't waste time composing a post which may or may not get accepted, and could even get deleted.

His post will get deleted if he hasn't noticed the big sign  "IMPORTANT: You must subscribe to the DBA Main mailing list for your message to be accepted.  " or has chosen to ignore it.  Good.  

Plus, you get a chance to grow your membership.

#2 is the new feature that we will have.

yes we already have this. I don't want 2 membership lists to maintain thank you very much..  



As for adding people to the authorized list - it's not like you need to add them one by one. There will be a textbox which you can dump your current subscriber list into it. The email list is actually already in our database, so we could do it on our end too. But it's better to give you the control, so you can decide when to add or remove.

I don't want 2 membership lists to maintain thank you very much. If you must do this sort of pain in the ass thing please automate it.

It worries me a lot that this sort of thing is being set up, it is exactly not what we wanted.  I already have a newsgroup interface to our email list to maintain.  To clarify: for each of our lists we have a mailman email server, and a Newsgroup provided by a different supplier, and the forum provided by Nabble.  This is a potential nightmare to administrate as it is.   The reason we liked Nabble is that it was a low admin way of having a forum interface to our email list.   If you keep going down this route we will switch to Yahoo Groups or any of the others who provide a one stop email and forum interface.  We would have done that a while back if any of them supported the newsgroups, but we are prepared to ditch the newsgroup if necessary.  Sorry if this is a bit stong but you need to see it from our point of view.  We don't have any paid staff to do all this admin.  

[David Beaumont]

remind me not to use the 'quote original' option again, I didn't realise it is then  truncated in the display.  Strikes me that Nabble is becoming over featured...

[Will L <Nabble>]

David, I think we can resolve this.

There is one key misunderstanding. You assume people will come to your archive from the archive front door. The reality is they more often hit your threads directly. Your threads has the content they are searching, and they just click "reply" trying to get in. They probably never see the front door, or even if they see, their focus is the thread, so they probably will miss your notice.

I understand your need for simplicity. The good news is that you can get it from Nabble. In about a week's time, we will release the mailing list feature. So, your archive can also function as a fully featured mailing list.

The root of the trouble is not this or that little features. The root of the trouble is the mailing list software doesn't have a good archive. Yahoo sucks. Googlegroup is better. But I am confident Nabble will beat everything out there.

So bear with us for another week, possibly even shorter, and check out our mailing list feature. Then we chat again.

[David Beaumont]

Ok, a switch to Nabble mailing list is another option.  Does it support newsgroups?  If not we are unlikely to move and if we don't move I am still unhappy with the extra member database to maintain and all the complications and admin that will arise.