Molle Bestefich wrote:
Tom Spear (Dustin Booker, Dustin Navea) wrote:
If solution 3 ever takes off, I will gladly contribute with coding. Realistically, though, i cannot implement something like this all by myself, especially not in any kind of a timely fashion.
I can contrib some code (need to start learning php anyways),
A single brave soldier. Not exactly the number I was hoping for. On the bright side we won't need a mailing list to communicate ;-).
in response to below, keyword is start learning, I dont know jack about php, so we will definitely need more than 2 people, that and I work a full time job that doesnt let me do much else, so I can do some small things, but as for writing half or even 1/8 of the implementation myself (even if i did know php), I dunno
I wonder about two things right now:
1.)
Do we agree on the way forward?
I'll quote in a more concrete fashion what I think would be neat in a moment.
I have this idea in my head that you'd like a phpBB forum and then implement a mailing list on top of each category. I think that will lead to somewhere near zero subscribers on those lists. Am I completely off the track here?
Well, yes and no.. You are right about 0 subs, and I'm not quite sure why i even said that, I should have just said we need to make sure certain (or all as the demand arises) people can subscribe to an entire category, even if they dont actually take advantage of that.. I would subscribe to all categories, set my settings up to only send me the headers of new topics, and then if the topic is interesting to me, or something I can help with, then I click the link to get to that topic, and read thru the messages already there, replying if necessary. Plus if I dont read a topic, and someone else does and they think I could help out with it, they could just send me the link, instead of me being CC:ed and getting new emails for each post
If we (the two of us, for a start) seem to agree, then we can try persuading Mike Hearn to hold the implementation of forum.winehq.org via phpBB off for a while while we try to make something work.
I like the idea of at least getting it started while we (the project) write our implementation. We just need to make sure that we can parse the phpbb databases when the time comes, so that we can xfer the topics and messages over to the new forums when they go live.
2.)
Is two people enough to implement the labourious parts, fx. a forum-like web interface?
I don't know.
I doubt it seriously, especially with 1 having no experience in php (me)
- Allow posting with your registered email address (automagically
sets "Reply-To:list" !)
If this is to be part of the forums on top of mailing lists idea, I thought of a way we could possibly do it, but it might be more laborious than even the web interface
- Notification daemon
- Pick up a list (DB) of which topics users want notifications for
- For each new message in DB,
- Send an email to interested users (if any)
- Flag as 'notification complete'
Make the notification settings user configurable so that if they only want to receive 1 email per thread, that is all they get (an email with the thread topic as the subject and a link to the thread in the body is how I want to set mine up)
Labor requirements guesstimate
- 'Register' web page: Low
- Forum login web page: Low
- Threading and DB import daemon Medium
- Notification daemon Medium
- Forum web interface High
Futureware
The following can be done later, or not at all:
Additions to Forum web interface
- Keep track of which threads and/or messages you've read (does a forum?)
- Rating system, fx. 'Sticky', 1-5 stars or Slashdotish
Mail gateway allowing to post with a pseudonym <random>@obscure.winehq.org
Additions to Threading and DB import daemon
- Try to guesstimate category for new list-originated topics
There are actually a couple of ways we could do this, none of them seem easy to me..
1) wine-forums@winehq.org : users subscribe to there to get every posting to the forums, only replying to the ones they want, just like current mailing lists are but its the forums emailing them instead of mailman.. Here is the key to #1.. Each thread has it's own pseudo email address that users respond to (instead of responding to the list).. The problem with this is that we end up eating lots of memory on the server with all of these pseudo emails when the forums get huge..
2) wine-forums@winehq.org : same as 1, except different key.. Each thread is replied to by responding to the list, and we parse the subject to determine which thread the email goes to.. What about when we end up with 2 threads named exactly the same? Should we do wine-forums-(category)@winehq instead? That would cut down on the likelyhood of identical thread names, but it still doesnt eliminate the problem.. How to fix this issue im not sure..
There is another problem with forums on top of a ml.. The order messages are posted, and auto quoting that most clients do.. When someone posts to a thread, and then someone else receives it in their inbox, they hit reply, the client quotes the entire last message. The forums need to strip that quote out before applying it to the database, and then look for a special keyword to mark what should be left in (such as [quote] blah [/quote] just like phpbb does but this is in an email)... Then there is when someone doesnt check their email right away, and still hits reply.... We need to put something in the headers that gets sent with a reply for the forums to determine where to put the message on the web layout (so that what would be message 8 looks like message 4 in the thread) If I need to draw a diagram for this one (because I know my wording is weird) let me know.
Of course now that I look at all I have said.. I still like the idea of forums on top of ml, but it doesn't look very feasible, even for the most advanced coders.. I'm still willing to give it a shot, but if it doesn't work out, I'd like to fall back to a phpbb at the very least...