Re: Postgres forums ... take 2

On 15 November 2010 08:34, Elliot Chance <elliotchance(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:

> Hi again,
>
> I've taken in all the feedback about http://forums.postgresql.com.au and
> the general consensus is that nobody wants a separate entity - a few people
> mentioned that if it was interoperable with the mailing list that it would
> be better. So I did.
>
> The concept goes like this;
> 1. Any posts to the general mailing list will be picked up by the forum,
> the email data is converted and posted on the forum, for example;
> http://forums.postgresql.com.au/viewtopic.php?f=30&t=39
> 2. Any reply to the forum will do the reverse and send the post back to the
> mailing list as a reply.
>
> This means the forum can be fully controlled through the mailing list
> without the need to visit the forums directly. However those people who
> prefer to use a forum interface can, and those messages are relayed back
> through the mailing list to get answered.
>
> Step 1 is complete (might need a little tweaking, i've only tried it with a
> couple of topics.) Step 2 I haven't begun - wanted to get some more
> feedback.
>
> All the forum topics and posts are back-dated to match the emails, which
> means it would be *theoretically* possible to load in the entire postgres
> mailing list archive but I wouldn't do that on a server that couldn't handle
> that much data.
>
> Disclaimer about user names:
> User names are registered automatically based on the unique email address
> of the person emailing the response. Each user is given a random 8 character
> password. You can use the recover password page to login to your account and
> change your user name to anything you want, the only important thing is that
> your email address matches.
>
> I know this is a sensitive issue with some people, i've made sure no
> information is posted thats not already currently being indexed by google.
>
> The only maintenance I can see is that all new topics are pushed into the
> General > Other category as the script can't differentiate what category it
> should in fact belong to, once the topic is moved it will stay there. This
> shouldn't be a real problem as theres not many new topics being created on
> any given day.
>

Elliot,

That's actually some good work you've done there! I didn't know phpBB
supported bidirectional mailing list support.

I think, however, that having such a forum at a .com.au address isn't
particularly desirable, as it implies it's regional. If others are happy
for you to work on this, it might be an idea to speak to the existing web
team to see if they are able to provide you with pointers and possibly
resources to get such a thing up and running. It would be nice, for
example, to have forums.postgresql.org set up.

A few points though. I think we'd need to disable smileys, bbcode, any form
of rich text formatting, flash or embedded images. In short, plain text
only, which is the policy on the mailing list. I think it would be more
useful if each forum directly corresponded to a mailing list too. What I
mean is that if there was a forum on the site which didn't match to a
mailing list, only forum users could use it.

Also, if someone registers on the forum, do they get a major domo
registration email? And if so, would this be set to receive no emails upon
registration? I'm not clear as to how this step would work because, at the
moment, mailing list subscribers have to subscribe on a list-by-list basis.
So registration to the forum site wouldn't necessarily mean they'd want to
join any particular mailing list. Similarly, could they unregister easily?
And anyone who attempts to post to a mailing list they aren't subscribed to
requires moderation, so we don't wish to exacerbate this.

But that's a nice start. :)

Cheers

--
Thom Brown
Twitter: @darkixion
IRC (freenode): dark_ixion
Registered Linux user: #516935