Marvin The Robomoderator

Marvin is a robomoderator. Marvin will moderate a newsgroup, automagically and without human intervention, except when something goes wrong. Everything is untested and under developement. You have been warned.

Essentially Marvin does the following:

  1. It receives mail sent to submission address
  2. It fixes some typical mistakes in the headers ("lint")
  3. It makes some checks to determine if the article will be rejected
  4. It makes some checks to determine whether the author should be warned (e.g. too long signature)
  5. If there were no grounds for rejection it will post the article.
  6. If it seems to be ok to send autoreply (no mail loops and the author has not requested no autoreplies) Marvin will compose and send an autoreply. If there were warnings (e.g. too long signatures) the Marvin will mention them in the autoreply. If the article was rejected, Marvin will list the reasons.

Marvin is written mostly in Python, with some small parts implemented in Bourne Shell script. Tests for the article are implemented as Python classes, which makes it easy to customize the rejection or warning criteria or to add more of the same stuff later on. The news article class (which takes care of most of the technical fluff) is implemented as a subclass of the standard rfc822.Message object.

Files


2001-05-06

http://www.iki.fi/kaip/marvin/

Kai Puolamäki (Kai.Puolamaki@iki.fi)