Mailman had me scratching my head for some time this weekend while I was trying to figure out how to change the URLs generated it its administration site. It turns out that Mailman copies configuration information into its list data at list creation time and then ignores changes to its main configuration file.

After modifying the OCLUG web site to redirect www.oclug.on.ca to oclug.on.ca (it's good for search ranking to not have duplicate URLs) part of the mailman administration interface stopped working. The problem was traced to the fact that the <FORM> tags pointed to www.oclug.on.ca and when apache redirected the request the post data was lost.

If mailman had used URLs without the host name there would be no problem. Grepping around the configuration directories and the individual list configurations revealed no instances of www.oclug.on.ca. However, Google helped me find the script that lets you change these little hidden values:

withlist -l -r fix_url $listname -v

This will update the host names for $listname from the main configuration file, and -v shows you what the changes are.

Tags: OCLUG Mailman