Re-proposal: web forums

[Molle Bestefich]

Segin wrote:
> People get upset with me cause I won't reveal my real name,

That, or maybe just because you act like an asshole :-).

n0dalus wrote:
> Some ideas:
> - Threads get shown in usual bulletin board style

What exactly is that?

I agree that the pipermail interface is nothing short of absolutely horrible.
I don't think I can emphasize that enough.

It's broken too, as is evident if you try one of the top links on this page:
http://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel/
I'll bet noone has noticed because it's so inadequate that noone uses it.

> - Moderators can move threads from the main area to other sections.

It would be nice to be able to filter out the noise.

I wonder how automated that should be.  We could:
 - star interesting topics
 - apply a slashdot-like rating system
 - sort by how many replies a posting got
 - sort by average number of vowels per word... whatever :-)

Another great boon would be a google-ish search engine able to search
both mailing lists, the ticket system and the documentation and
present the results in a comprehensible way.  Something like the
little miracle that Trac accomplishes, eg.:
http://projects.edgewall.com/trac/search

> Threads can be created by users directly in user-writable sections

Probably not too hard to implement.

We could allow pseudonyms too, by having a 'hide my email address'
checkbox and obfuscating users email addresses and supplying them with
a <random>@obfuscated.winehq.org address.

Anything the user enters in the hypothetical web interface would seem
to come from that address, anything going to that address would be
forwarded to the user.  There should be a confirmation email the first
time a user posts, so we at least know that his real email address
(that we hide) exists.

I'm not even sure a password would be needed for obfuscated access -
since the user is the only person knowing his real email address, that
could suffice as login information when posting to the lists through
the web interface.

> - Users on the forum can send messages to other users in a similar fashion

One of the points of avoiding phpBB or similar would be to keep the
communication in one place.  So I don't think we want to encourage
private communication between users by letting the web interface be
some kind of IM system, if that's what you propose.

> - Reply notifications can be configured by the user to be sent to their personal address

Hmm, I guess you could conjure up something like that.

It should crawl the list archives and forward postings that the user
would like to watch.

And at the same time we need to block Cc's sent from people on the
list to <random>@obfuscated.winehq.org from going through, since the
crawler will forward the appropriate postings.

Doesn't sound bad at all.

> - Posts are all plain text, with optional attachments (some reasonable limits apply)

Sounds good, I hate those pesky icons and and animated smileys
littering phpBB forums :-).


All this makes me wonder if someone hasn't already invented some fancy
software to make mailing lists more available to the average Joe User.
 Anyone know?