"list my other subscriptions" does not

[Ross Boylan]

Summary: "list my other subscriptions" fails to list all my subscriptions at mail.kde.org, and obeys no consistent rule I can discern. There is a secondary issue: the word "other" is misleading, as the list includes the list from which one clicks that button. I suggest changing it to "list my subscriptions" or "list all my subscriptions at this site."

This was at mail.kde.org, running MM 2.1.14. The site administrator says the code has not been customized locally; I couldn't get info on the exact OS or package.

A mail failure on my end caused several days of bounced emails and I
wanted to check that my subscriptions were OK at mail.kde.org. Through
<email address hidden> I subscribe to kde, kdepim-users, and kde-linux,
The first list checked (kde-linux? maybe kde) looked OK (mail delivery was
enabled) and so I clicked on "list my other subscriptions". This showed
2 of the 3 subs, not kdepim-users. I went to kdepim-user's general
interface and asked to list subscribers. It accepted my edress and
password, and showed my edress among the subscribers.

When I checked my info for kdepim-users it again seemed to show my
subscription as active. I noticed I had misspelled my name, and
corrected it. I suspected that the name misspelling accounted for the
fact kdkepim-users did not show up in my list of subscriptions.

Note that all 3 lists show up in the site's master list of mailman lists; they are in the same domain.

From kdepim-users I then clicked "list my other subscriptions". Again I
saw only 2, but a different 2: kde was missing. When I logged into
that list my subscription again looked fine. I clicked on list other
subs, and this time got a list that had only kde on it (note that the
first list of subscriptions I saw had kde and kde-linux, but not kdepim). This disproved
my theory that it would only show 2, as well as my theory about the name
misspelling mattering.

All accounts have the same password.

I suspect this is just a cosmetic problem, but am not sure.

I used Konqueror 3.5.9 on KDE 3.5.10 under Debian Lenny. I know; I'm
living in the past.

I discussed this with site admin; he had no ideas about what could be causing this behavior.

Thanks for your work on mailman!

[Mark Sapiro (msapiro)]

First, this is not intended to be a site wide list. All the "globally" and "other subscriptions" functions on the user options page only affect those lists whose host_name attribute (web admin -> General Options -> host_name), aka the domain of the email address of the list, matches that of the list whose options page is being visited. This is by design to support virtual hosts.

I'm sure this has nothing to do with the spelling of your name. You can verify this if correcting the spelling didn't "fix" the problem.

The problem is that the lists (from their listinfo pages) are <email address hidden>, <email address hidden> and <email address hidden>. I.e. the kde list is in a different domain from the other two as far as Mailman is concerned and "list my other subscriptions" from the kde options page will only list *@mail.kde.org subscriptions and "list my other subscriptions" from the kde-linux or kdepim-users options page will only list *@kde.org subscriptions.

[Ross Boylan (rossboylan)]

Thank your for your response; it's very helpful. The behavior I reported isn't entirely consistent with that explanation, but I may have remembered incorrectly because when I try now everything does fit what you said.

There are 2 smaller issues that remain.
1. "list my other subscriptions" is worded incorrectly, since the result includes the lists from which you click list other subscriptions. I think "list my subscriptions" would be more correct. That is, if you subscribe to lists A, B, and C and are visiting list A, "list my other subscriptions" shows A, B, and C, while only B and C are "other" subscriptions.

2. The link at the bottom of the page, e.g., "Overview of all kde.org mailing lists" goes to a list that includes everything from kde.org and mail.kde.org, that is it does not respect the domain restrictions. From my point of view this is a feature, not a bug, but it seems inconsistent with the "each domain on its own" model.

[Mark Sapiro (msapiro)]

Regarding your item 1) in comment #2, I marked the bug "won't fix" rather than "invalid" because I agree you had some valid points. However, if I change the English text of that message, that means until the message catalogs for 38 other languages are updated, those 38 translated versions will display that button label in English. This is an impact which I judge to be too severe for the value of the change in a mature "serious bug and security fix only" version (Mailman 2.1.x). This is irrelevant in MM3 because the web UI is totally new.

Regarding item 2), I agree this is inconsistent, but the inconsistency is not with the "each domain is separate" model; it is with how we determine whether a list is in "this" domain. It occurs because lists to be displayed on the listinfo (and admin) overviews are determined based on whether the host portion of the invoking URL matches the web host of the list, and "List my other subscriptions" is based on whether the email host of the other list matches the email host of the list whose options page you post it from.

Apparently at kde.org, all the lists are in the mail.kde.org web domain, but some are in the mail.kde.org email domain while most (at least of the sample I looked at) are in the kde.org email domain.

Note that it would be a simple matter for an admin of the Mailman installation at mail.kde.org to fix this issue for this site. What needs to be done is to ensure that the following appear in the installation's mm_cfg.py file:

DEFAULT_URL_HOST = 'mail.kde.org'
DEFAULT_EMAIL_HOST = 'kde.org'
add_virtualhost( DEFAULT_URL_HOST, DEFAULT_EMAIL_HOST)

and then run the following command as root or the Mailman user or via sudo from Mailman's bin/ directory

 ./withlist -l -a -r fix_url

See the FAQs at <http://wiki.list.org/x/lYA9> and <http://wiki.list.org/x/mIA9> for more information.