It looks like there is plenty of flexibility with assignable permissions for NNTP client using nnrpd and its readers.conf. Hooking external programs into the authn/z rules for readers.conf should make it easy to satisfy any of the needs we have. The key will be to get this sync'd with the mailman access rules, which shouldn't be to hard if we create the mailman config files and control the nnrpd config backend from the same code base. Using python seems like a natural fit.
jpr's blog
