[Politech] Administrivia: List is up on new server, Mailman changes

declan@private

Politech is finally running on the new server! That's why you received the 
resubscription message earlier today. The biggest change is that I've 
switched over to GNU Mailman, which has the benefit of many more options 
(like daily digests and subscribe-only-to-certain-topics).

Mailman also has the undeniable downside of being an unruly beast to 
configure. It took me until Saturday to get it installed properly (it, 
improbably, insisted on being configured with two different group IDs at 
the same time) and on Sunday I finally debugged a strange interaction with 
Postfix's anti-spam measures that caused it to reject mail to non-local 
domains.

Now that it's installed, though, Mailman should be an improvement. You can 
sign up for a daily digest (something that some folks have wanted for a 
long time) by typing your email address in at the bottom of this page:
http://politechbot.com/mailman/listinfo/politech

I'm also going to experiment with labeling posts with categories. You can 
choose to receive only categories that you want. The initial four 
categories are privacy, spam, copyright, and free speech. Go to that same 
URL, above, used to edit your digest settings and you can select this 
there. If you do nothing, everything will work as before.

[[[IMPORTANT: If you do this, set "Do you want to receive messages that do 
not match any topic filter?" as YES. Otherwise you'll miss messages for 
which I haven't set a category, like security or antitrust.]]]

There are still lots of things to do, like integrating Mailman with Movable 
Type, spam-proofing the archives, figuring out whether to use MHonarc, 
Mailman/pipermail, or a blog utility, and wiring in a better search 
function for the archives. Some sysadmins on the list (thanks Gabe, Rob!) 
have already been very helpful.

I've set up a discussion list (admin@private) just for this 
purpose. If you're willing to help with expanding Politech, please go here 
to sign up:
http://politechbot.com/mailman/listinfo/admin

Thanks,
Declan

PS: You may have to update your procmail/Outlook/Eudora filters by matching 
on the current Sender: line.
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