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 ;-).
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?
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.
2.) === Is two people enough to implement the labourious parts, fx. a forum-like web interface?
I don't know.
Concrete proposal (also attached, in case Gmail linewraps too badly) =================
* 'Register' web page - Same functionality as Mailman subscribe (piggyback Mailman list configuration) - Email delivery is turned off when registering - Wording in emails should be altered ("forum" vs. "mailing list", "register" vs. "subscribe")
* Forum login web page - Piggyback Mailman user database. We'll automagically achieve single sign-on whenever Mailman @ WineHQ does ;-).
* Threading and import daemon - Imports raw .eml files - Stores in DB - Assigns internal thread/topic ID to each mail based on Message-ID, References and Subject - Inspiration?: weaverd @ http://weaver.gmane.org/
* Forum web interface - Sorted by Category, assignable to each thread/topic (Also wanted: subcategories) - Threaded view - Search engine (use DB fulltext index) - Allow posting with your registered email address (automagically sets "Reply-To:list" !) - Allow ticking of topics you're interested in ("follow this topic" checkbox when posting or so) - Inspiration?: http://forums.mysql.com and phpBB
* 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'
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