Apple Mail has not been copying the mailing list, so excuse the reposts if you got one.
Begin forwarded message: > From: Elliot Chance <elliotcha...@gmail.com> > Date: 16 November 2010 4:57:27 PM AEDT > To: Craig Ringer <cr...@postnewspapers.com.au> > Subject: Re: [GENERAL] Postgres forums ... take 2 > > On 16/11/2010, at 2:01 PM, Craig Ringer wrote: > >> On 15/11/10 17:37, Thom Brown wrote: >> >>> That's actually some good work you've done there! I didn't know phpBB >>> supported bidirectional mailing list support. >> >> Yikes. Neither did I. I've always seen phpBB as the barren wasteland of >> web forums - forums full of half-page animated GIF signatures separating >> single lines of text, some kind of content-free zone of minimum >> information density. Maybe it can be configured to be better than that >> after all. >> >> How does it handle threading? Will forum threads be properly threaded? >> And will replies have the correct In-Reply-To: <msgid> header so they >> get threaded correctly? > > It uses the message-id and in-reply-to header information, so a change in > email subject will not effect the flow of the thread. However not all emails > stick by those rules, a few emails do not carry the header information in > which case the script strips the subject (to remove "Re:", "[GENERAL]") and > then matches the topic by name as a fall back. > > Email header information can be sketchy at the best of times, but this does a > pretty good job at making sure almost all of the messages are handled > correctly. In some rare cases when the in-reply-to is missing and the subject > has changed it will create a new thread, but a forum moderator can click a > button to merge the threads and all is fixed. > >> >> Have you been in touch with the Pg list admins to make sure they're cool >> with this? > > At this point its a good idea, who is the best person(s) to contact? I want > to make sure anything I do does not in any way reflect badly on the community > or seem like i'm doing anything dishonest. > >> >>> A few points though. I think we'd need to disable smileys, bbcode, any >>> form of rich text formatting, flash or embedded images. >> >> Mostly agreed. Limiting signatures to 4/5 lines would be nice too. > > All forum software limits the size of a signature to stop people abusing it. > As the signature is a separate entity the mail that comes from the forum can > contain or ignore the signature. > >> >> Limited HTML is really useful on web forums, though, as it allows you to >> delineate code from other text. Unless the whole forum is set to >> monospaced text with preserved whitespace, that's necessary to ensure >> that code samples are readable. > > That's one thing that can't be fixed when incoming emails are converted to > forums posts the code blocks appear as normal text. > > There is no use importing huge archives seeing as most of it is either too > old to be relevant, bloat the forum and most people don't bother using a > search anyway before posting. But it may be alright to say import the last > few months of data (that include product release announcements, active bugs > etc.) I have written another script which imports the mbox files just as a > proof of concept: > http://forums.postgresql.com.au/viewforum.php?f=34 > Those 7 threads were imported from a single months mbox file. > >> >> -- >> Craig Ringer >> >> Tech-related writing: http://soapyfrogs.blogspot.com/ >
