On 16 Nov 2016, at 08:55, Shal Farley <shals2nd@gmail.com> wrote:

Christopher,

Well, it could be set up on a pwer owner basis?

That's likely possible. But I think the question then is what happens when more than one moderator is on vacation? Does the member get a notice from each of them? That seems a bit overkill.

But I think the real problem is that gives the wrong impression if there are other moderators still active - the member probably doesn't care *which* moderator handles his/her message; but getting a "vacation" response from one (or more) implies that no one is handling the inbound messages (that's the usual meaning for an email box).

So perhaps one could set it up so that the vacation response is issued only if *all* of the owner/moderators are on vacation. But that too has problems if some have gone permanently inactive, unless other mods can set/unset that status on their behalf.

The other option is to have it be a single setting on behalf of the whole moderation team. That way they present a united front to the members. But the individual moderators may have imperfect knowledge of each others' status. So that too has problems if one moderator sets it but others are still active, or if everyone goes on vacation but no one thought they were the "last one out".

There may be an obviously right answer to this, but I haven't thought of it (yet?).

At the moment I'm leaning towards each moderator having their own setting, and the message sent only if all are "on vacation". This has the property that if there's only one owner/mod it works as expected.

Each mod's status should be shown in a column of the Moderators list so that the management team can be aware of each other's status. Probably there also an ability to set the status on behalf of an inactive moderator.

Another idea: maybe instead of just a vacation checkbox, it should be a date/time field that lets each moderator set an "I'll be back on" date, with "Off" and "Never" both being available choices.

Shal
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