On Fri, 2013-02-01 at 01:00 +0100, Dave Neary wrote:
I've come across cases where this would be useful several times - has anyone seen a mailman configuration that resembles this?
It is possible in Mailman to restrict posting to a list to a subset of the members - you set the "Moderation" flag and set behaviour for all moderated users to "Discard" or "Reject" (reject lets the poster know the mail was rejected, which might be better) in "Privacy options->Sender filters" - then you unset the mod bit for all board members in "Membership management".
That would allow you to have non-board-members subscribe to the board list, get all the email, but not be able to post. If members really want to raise issues related to the board member post, then it can be done on foundation, but you'd need to manually change the header (which might be an effective social control to bike shedding board conversations, rather than trying to figure out how to have reply-to set to a different list for a subset of the membership).
I have no idea whether it is possible, but if it is then it would work pretty well except the "non-directors need to change the Reply: header when replying" part. That's not terrible, and we can actively encourage people to do it. Cheers, Mark.