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

Alrighty, here are the revised plans for beta3:

--- Changes / Fixes

* Without a doubt everyone one wants the forums to match the mailing lists. I personally think that this defeats the
wholepurpose of a forum, but i'm here to do what the community thinks is best. The extra forums that are not connected
witha mailing list will be removed. And some of the forums renamed - i'll leave that part up to you to decide amongst
yourselves.

* Obviously the above point means no filing script is needed. But for JRoeleveld; I had already through about that - I
wasthinking of a point keyword system. A title that has 3 words that belong to 3 different forums goes nowhere because
asingle forum location is no stronger than the rest but at best it's machine guesswork and we all know how different
theoreticalplans can be from practicality. 

* The second largest issue is that of the email address to assign to emails created by forum posts. I don't know the
internalsof how the mailing list software works, but some thoughts; 
 - Does the mailing allow a range of email addresses? For example using the persons clean username like:
"forums-chancey@postgresql.com.au"or "forums-bobsmith@postgresql.com.au" hence we allow the
"forums-*@postgresql.com.au"range? This way I can use a catch all address and filter. 
 - If theres an API to the mailing list that lets me register the persons real email address without then having to get
separatecopies in their inbox and also does not require a URL to be clicked to enable that email? 

* Quotation. Emails have a higher depth of quotation - it is not uncommon for a single email to contain levels for the
past4 emails and this works well in emails but not in a forum, this makes posts much longer then they need to be in
mostcases and bloats the search with loads of repeated information. 
For example phpBB3 by default limits the max quote level to 3 to stop extraneous information. I'm still thinking of a
solutionfor this. 

* Quotation ownership. You will notice that emails take the form something like:
Bob Smith <bob@smith.com> wrote:
> 1 + 1 = 2?
Yes.

The above gets translated only so that the ">" gets converted into the [quote] tags for the forums display. But quoting
inforums adds the ownership into the quote block, so the above would look like (forums do this automatically when you
quotesomeone): 
| Quote by [Bob Smith]:
| 1 + 1 = 2?
Yes.

Where [Bob Smith] is a link to the forum user. I originally wrote this into beta1 but saw there was no consistency and
emailscame in with "wrote:" "writes:" or something that just didn't make sense at all so I disabled the code until I
wasready to work on it properly. I will institute it again - wish me luck... 

--- Testing

* Don't be alarmed if your some posts don't show up. The parser script is not on a cron for now and I may be deleting
orplaying with posts while I tweak it, the idea is that things will get messy while its being tested and then wipe the
forumscompletely and use the mbox importer which I wrote a few hours ago to add the real posts. 

* I added user back dating in beta2. This means that if a mbox from 2 years ago is imported (hypothetically) the user
isautomatically back dated to the earliest post so it will show then as signed up 2 years ago with X posts per day
sincethen. Anyone want to guess who's had the most posts overall? 

--- Other notes

I didn't quote all the appropriate people above to keep the plan for beta3 clean. beta3 is when concept turns into a
clear(er)plan. Lets get all this worked before I start coding. 

Nobody has made much comment on the permission of containing the mailing list information and member email addresses in
anothercontainer like a forum. I understand that I can broadcast this information on other mailing lists (www was
mentioned)but if theres no absolute authority figure would it make any serious difference from what we're already
doing?

Cheers,
Elliot