Fwd: Postgres forums ... take 2

Apple Mail has not been copying the mailing list, so excuse the reposts if you got one.

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Elliot Chance <elliotchance(at)gmail(dot)com>
> Date: 16 November 2010 4:57:27 PM AEDT
> To: Craig Ringer <craig(at)postnewspapers(dot)com(dot)au>
> Subject: Re: [GENERAL] Postgres forums ... take 2
>
> On 16/11/2010, at 2:01 PM, Craig Ringer wrote:
>
>> On 15/11/10 17:37, Thom Brown wrote:
>>
>>> That's actually some good work you've done there! I didn't know phpBB
>>> supported bidirectional mailing list support.
>>
>> Yikes. Neither did I. I've always seen phpBB as the barren wasteland of
>> web forums - forums full of half-page animated GIF signatures separating
>> single lines of text, some kind of content-free zone of minimum
>> information density. Maybe it can be configured to be better than that
>> after all.
>>
>> How does it handle threading? Will forum threads be properly threaded?
>> And will replies have the correct In-Reply-To: <msgid> header so they
>> get threaded correctly?
>
> It uses the message-id and in-reply-to header information, so a change in email subject will not effect the flow of the thread. However not all emails stick by those rules, a few emails do not carry the header information in which case the script strips the subject (to remove "Re:", "[GENERAL]") and then matches the topic by name as a fall back.
>
> Email header information can be sketchy at the best of times, but this does a pretty good job at making sure almost all of the messages are handled correctly. In some rare cases when the in-reply-to is missing and the subject has changed it will create a new thread, but a forum moderator can click a button to merge the threads and all is fixed.
>
>>
>> Have you been in touch with the Pg list admins to make sure they're cool
>> with this?
>
> At this point its a good idea, who is the best person(s) to contact? I want to make sure anything I do does not in any way reflect badly on the community or seem like i'm doing anything dishonest.
>
>>
>>> A few points though. I think we'd need to disable smileys, bbcode, any
>>> form of rich text formatting, flash or embedded images.
>>
>> Mostly agreed. Limiting signatures to 4/5 lines would be nice too.
>
> All forum software limits the size of a signature to stop people abusing it. As the signature is a separate entity the mail that comes from the forum can contain or ignore the signature.
>
>>
>> Limited HTML is really useful on web forums, though, as it allows you to
>> delineate code from other text. Unless the whole forum is set to
>> monospaced text with preserved whitespace, that's necessary to ensure
>> that code samples are readable.
>
> That's one thing that can't be fixed when incoming emails are converted to forums posts the code blocks appear as normal text.
>
> There is no use importing huge archives seeing as most of it is either too old to be relevant, bloat the forum and most people don't bother using a search anyway before posting. But it may be alright to say import the last few months of data (that include product release announcements, active bugs etc.) I have written another script which imports the mbox files just as a proof of concept:
> http://forums.postgresql.com.au/viewforum.php?f=34
> Those 7 threads were imported from a single months mbox file.
>
>>
>> --
>> Craig Ringer
>>
>> Tech-related writing: http://soapyfrogs.blogspot.com/
>