There's quite a bit of call for greater civility as a stronger rule on wikien-l, and the listmods would be very happy to put this into action. The trouble is, the current Mailman interface isn't very fine-grained.

wikien-l is a problematic beast: it's an official forum for en:wp discussion, and it's also the forum of last resort for many banned or disfavoured editors. This creates an interesting dynamic ... We'd love to do more to cut the rubbish down. However, we need more ability to manage the posts of posters who are on moderation.

A poster can be (a) free to post, (b) have their posts held for moderation, or (c) kicked off the list. The second category, moderated posts, show up randomly amongst a ridiculously large daily pile of penis spam. This makes it laborious to keep even one or two frequent contributors on strict moderation. Newbies always start moderated, so as to keep address-morphing trolls at bay. (We've taken it off before and they come right back.)

Things that would be nice:

* Some "reason" field for moderation. e.g. "first-time poster", "warned about querulousness", "chronically incivil". * The moderation interface to put moderated posts at the beginning of the list. Then we just have to check through the penis spam for messages from unsubscribed posters.

Does anyone have Mailman knowledge that might be helpful on either of these? (The Mailman 2.1 documentation is disorganised and incomplete, so I might easily have missed something that says "tick here to make these two things happen.")

- d.