Add a JavaScript toggle to set held message status from Hold to Discard

[Greg Grossmeier]

Being the owner of a team that has a moderated (subscribers only) mailing list hosted by Launchpad, I need to manually delete ("discard") all spam occasionally.

In a standard mailman install there is an option to "Discard all messages marked Defer" with "Defer" being the default value of a message.

There is no such option in the Launchpad mailing list view (~<teamname>/+mailinglist-moderate). Adding such an option would make this time-wasting event less time-wasting.

[Curtis Hovey (sinzui)]

Barry, what is the cost of doing this?

[Greg Grossmeier (greg.grossmeier)]

To show the amount of time being used by a team owner see the current mailing list queue for ~ubuntu-cyclists:
https://edge.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-cyclists/+mailinglist-moderate (if you have the requisite ability).

Between the dates of June 6th, 2009 and July 7th, 2009, there are 166 messages needing to be discarded (spam). The only method of accomplishing this task is to click the radial button for each message, 166 clicks with the added time of scrolling. However, this is still a Low priority task, in my opinion, as I will just continue to ignore that page until I can Discard All.

A partial work around would be implementing the mailman setting of "max_days_to_hold" (deleting held messages after X number of days) (Bug #396592).

[Barry Warsaw (barry)]

There are three things we can do here.

First, we can expose the max_days_to_hold feature. I would like to make this an option for the team owner, though I'm not sure whether it should be a simple toggle with a hardcoded time limit, or full control over the number of days. I'll chat with Martin about that.

Second, while I do not actually like the Mailman feature of "discard-all-holds" I think we can do slightly better in Launchpad. We should add a JavaScript control to set all held message statuses to Discard. That's all the JS would do.

Third, see bug 385180 which would allow you to moderate your held messages through the API. I think this, with a convenient script is the best approach.

I will file a new bug for the discard-all-holds JS.

[Barry Warsaw (barry)]

nm. I forgot about bug 396592