Re: Postgres forums ... take 2

On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 13:43, Elliot Chance <elliotchance(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> Alrighty, here are the revised plans for beta3:
>
> * The second largest issue is that of the email address to assign to emails created by forum posts. I don't know the internals of 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(at)postgresql(dot)com(dot)au" or "forums-bobsmith(at)postgresql(dot)com(dot)au" hence we allow the "forums-*(at)postgresql(dot)com(dot)au" range? This way I can use a catch all address and filter.

It does allow regular expressions in some ways, but I'm not sure it
does it in this case - nor that it's the best idea.

>  - If theres an API to the mailing list that lets me register the persons real email address without then having to get separate copies in their inbox and also does not require a URL to be clicked to enable that email?

There's no actual API, but it can be done - and has been done before -
by screen-scraping the CGI interface. See for example
https://github.com/mhagander/hamn/blob/master/listsync.py

> * Quotation. Emails have a higher depth of quotation - it is not uncommon for a single email to contain levels for the past 4 emails and this works well in emails but not in a forum, this makes posts much longer then they need to be in most cases 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 solution for this.

If you can find a way to represent it "the email way" in email and
"the forum way" in the forums, that's obviously the best...

> * Quotation ownership. You will notice that emails take the form something like:
> Bob Smith <bob(at)smith(dot)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 in forums adds the ownership into the quote block, so the above would look like (forums do this automatically when you quote someone):
> | 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 emails came in with "wrote:" "writes:" or something that just didn't make sense at all so I disabled the code until I was ready to work on it properly. I will institute it again - wish me luck...

You can't safely rely on that format of the quoting header. "Proper"
quoting will always have > (top-posting often doesn't, but if we can't
parse that into proper quotes, I don't think it's a problem), but you
can't rely on the format of the row(s) before it.

OTOH, if it gets wrong here and there it's not a big problem. it just
mustn't get wrong too often :)

> Nobody has made much comment on the permission of containing the mailing list information and member email addresses in another container 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?

We don't deal in authority figures, we deal in authority teams :-)
Just like with the source to the database.

There are some people who read -www that don't read -general. That are
fairly critical. So I suggest moving the thread over there.

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