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

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.

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.


> however theres needs to be a robust way to make sure the topics/threads and posts match up with the threads and
emailsin the mailing list. The problem I see is that replies to the forum are not technically replies via email and so
theywill 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.


> There needs to be more forum mapping from specific forums to mailing lists, for example "Languages > Perl" to the
closestmailing list which might be pgsql-general. However once the topic is created in a forum all the responses will
stayin 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.


> The infrastructure exists to create as many forum mappings as needed, and I could add post processing. So for example
anemail 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.


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 :-)


--
 Magnus Hagander
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 Work: http://www.redpill-linpro.com/