Re: Postgres forums ... take 2 - Mailing list pgsql-general

On Tuesday 16 November 2010 10:30:05 Magnus Hagander wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 03:45, Elliot Chance <elliotchance@gmail.com> wrote:
> > I have made some major changes "beta2"
>
> <snip>
>
> > Extra thoughts;
> >
> > It would not be practical for the forums to create a dummy mailing list
> > email address per person or forum,
>
> Why? It doesn't have to be actual mailboxes, but it needs to be a
> deliverable email address.
>
> The other option is, of course, to send the email using the email
> address the forum user uses to register with the forum. That might
> cause issues with some antispam solutions, but as long as it's done
> right, I think that would work.

If this is done in cooperation with the list admins, they could whitelist the
forum-server for this?

> Personally, I find the lack of this a show-stopper issue. We do *not*
> want what's basically going to be anonymous posts on the lists.

I agree, as it's an easy way for spammers to start spamming the whole list.
Has anyone thought about what would happen if someone does an unsubscribe for
the forum email? :)

> > however theres needs to be a robust way to make sure the topics/threads
> > and posts match up with the threads and emails in the mailing list. The
> > problem I see is that replies to the forum are not technically replies
> > via email and so they will not carry the unique "in-reply-to"
> > identifier.
>
> The email generated is a reply via email, and carries a message id. It
> should be perfectly possible to chain those together using
> in-reply-to, as long as all posts are mirrored between the two media.

I think the only way to correctly mirror these 2 is to use one as the master
and have the other populated by the master.
As the mailing list already exists and is used a lot already, I would think
the following would work:
- user posts on forum, email is generated. When email comes from list, it is
entered into the forum

I believe this is how gmane works.

> > There needs to be more forum mapping from specific forums to mailing
> > lists, for example "Languages > Perl" to the closest mailing list which
> > might be pgsql-general. However once the topic is created in a forum all
> > the responses will stay in that forum, so even though people reply on
> > the pgsql-general mailing list the replies appear under Languages >
> > Perl.
>
> IMHO, there needs to be a one-to-one mapping, and nothing else.

Agreed

> > The infrastructure exists to create as many forum mappings as needed, and
> > I could add post processing. So for example an email to pgsql-general
> > with the title "perl won't connect" will recognise "perl" and move it to
> > the Languages > Perl.
>
> That sounds like a really bad idea - it's going to cause nothing but
> confusion.

How will it be done if a subject contains more then one "keywords"?
Eg. "Porting C-code to Perl causes performance issue"
I see "C", "Perl" and "Performance"
Where will it then be moved to?

> I'm not a big user of web forums (I use them when I have to, but it's
> certainly not a medium I consider efficient so I don't choose it), so
> here's a question that may be obvious, but still required: quoting.
> Can the forum software be set up to always quote responses properly?
> And somehow discourage top-posting in said responses? We absolutely do
> *not* want a forum to start feeding non-quoted responses back to the
> mailinglists, and non-quoted responses is unfortunately pretty common
> on most forums where I usually end up - but again, that is hopefully
> just a setting :-)

I doubt that, I am also on a mailing list where a similar link is already set
up.
I occasionally get emails there without quotes. It's ok if the thread isn't
too old. But if someone replies to a thread that's more then a year old, it
doesn't get linked up. (I move older posts into subfolders to keep my mail
client responsive)

If I feel like it, I can then click on the link to the forum to read the
actual thread. At least that way it is possible to make sense of it.

--
Joost