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

On 16 November 2010 09:30, Magnus Hagander <magnus@hagander.net> 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.

Won't the vast majority of those require moderation if users aren't
signed up to a mailing list?  I mean we could have the "reply-to"
header value contain the forum's email address, but the "from" address
would be rejected by the list surely?  If that could somehow be made
to work, that would be ideal though.

> 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.

Definitely.

> IMHO, there needs to be a one-to-one mapping, and nothing else.

Agreed.  The justification for a forum, from my perspective, is
another method of interacting with the mailing list to open it up to a
wider audience.  I don't like the idea of additional forums which
don't match a mailing list as it would not only create community
fragmentation, but most of the people with the answers won't be
reading the forums.

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

Yes, we wouldn't want any clever logic to automagically file the posts
into certain categories.  We don't have that on the mailing lists, so
the forum also shouldn't have it.

> 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 :-)

Have you seen Elliot's prototype?  From what I've seen, quoting comes
through fine.  It would just have to work correctly the other way, in
that it sends plain text emails with correct levels of chevrons.

A test mailing list will no doubt need to be set up for testing such
functionality.  But before too much work commences on this, will this
have the backing of the team?  I personally think, even though I don't
want a forum myself, others will, and it would reduce barriers to the
community.  Obviously it will need to work seamlessly too, so that it
doesn't cause any issues on the mailing lists themselves.

--
Thom Brown
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