Alrighty, here are the revised plans for beta3:

--- Changes / Fixes

* Without a doubt everyone one wants the forums to match the mailing lists. I 
personally think that this defeats the whole purpose of a forum, but i'm here 
to do what the community thinks is best. The extra forums that are not 
connected with a mailing list will be removed. And some of the forums renamed - 
i'll leave that part up to you to decide amongst yourselves.

* Obviously the above point means no filing script is needed. But for 
JRoeleveld; I had already through about that - I was thinking of a point 
keyword system. A title that has 3 words that belong to 3 different forums goes 
nowhere because a single forum location is no stronger than the rest but at 
best it's machine guesswork and we all know how different theoretical plans can 
be from practicality.

* 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-chan...@postgresql.com.au" or 
"forums-bobsm...@postgresql.com.au" hence we allow the 
"forum...@postgresql.com.au" range? This way I can use a catch all address and 
filter.
 - 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?

* 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.

* Quotation ownership. You will notice that emails take the form something like:
Bob Smith <b...@smith.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...

--- Testing

* Don't be alarmed if your some posts don't show up. The parser script is not 
on a cron for now and I may be deleting or playing with posts while I tweak it, 
the idea is that things will get messy while its being tested and then wipe the 
forums completely and use the mbox importer which I wrote a few hours ago to 
add the real posts.

* I added user back dating in beta2. This means that if a mbox from 2 years ago 
is imported (hypothetically) the user is automatically back dated to the 
earliest post so it will show then as signed up 2 years ago with X posts per 
day since then. Anyone want to guess who's had the most posts overall?

--- Other notes

I didn't quote all the appropriate people above to keep the plan for beta3 
clean. beta3 is when concept turns into a clear(er) plan. Lets get all this 
worked before I start coding.

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?

Cheers,
Elliot


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