My whole objective is to allow some, possibly even all, of my users
the ability to see who's currently hogging all the machines in our
oversubscribed testbed so that they can use physical violence or
other means not of any concern to me to free up machines for their
own experiments.
Well, "all" is easy as you mention. But I do not recommend it.
How about this. Change the test to:
if ($isadmin || STUDLY() || $openlist_member) {
and then set the "studly" bit on those users via the web interface (on the
user's profile page, there is a toggle).
STUDLY() turns on some other stuff in the web interface, but I don't
think it will matter too much. Nothing that matters since its intended
for people who are trusted to behave.
Lbs