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Entries tagged forums

We should just deal with nice people

16 November 2008 21:50

For various reasons I've recently been thinking about forums.

Many technical users dislike forums, because they are things that are hard to follow. Even with RSS feeds & etc you need to keep a login and remember to return to see if your post(s) have been answered.

However non-technical users love forums, and from a community-building perspective they're very cheap and easy. Particularly if you manage to appoint moderators from within the comunity.

I currently find myself in a position where I'd kinda like to have a forum package. Something that I can integrate into existing site easily.

Unfortunately most of the "best" forum packages are PHP-based, and have their own complex login, group, and admin facilities. That makes it hard to update them to authenticate against my existing MySQL table(s). (We'll leave my PHP-allergy in the background)

So, once more, I've been contemplating the bad route; create my own forum software. I'm well aware that down that path lies badness madnesss.

Let us recap. What is a forum?

  • A forum is an online site.
  • With a coarse list of topics.
  • Inside each topic is a list of threads.
  • Each thread is comprised of a number of (threaded) messages.

Sound familiar? It should if you use email:

  • ~/Maildir contains storage for a collection of mailboxes.
  • Each mailbox is a course list of topic-specific discussion.
  • Each topic is comprised of a number of (threaded) messages.

So, the unthinkable, could we convert (bi/uni-directinally?) from a Maildir hierarchy to an online forum?

Would that make sense? On the face of it. Yes.

There are implementation details - the forum index would be essentially a list of Maildir folders (perhaps "~/Maildir/topic1/.title" would be require to give it a pretty name).

Each thread topic would be a rendered display of the messages in the folder.

So, what are the drawbacks? Well reading Maildir folders gives us threading, and subjects, bodies, etc. But it does mean a fair bit of overhead parsing messages.

(Times like this I remember Hughe. Every time we've gotten together for beer & geekery the topic of an extensible perl-based IMAP server comes up. I'm sure it should be written ..)

I'll wrap this up now. I'm sure I've made the point. There are some details which have impact - Should the forum accept new posts online? Or only via gated email-delivery? Will it work? Should it be Maildir, or IMAP based? Still at least filtering your SPAM would be easy ;)

More questions. Some questions have no answers. Some answers we ignore because we don't like.

I need to sleep.

ObFilm: 007: Quantum of Solace

Bad film. Don't waste your pennies.

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Thank you for coming back to me.

20 August 2009 21:50

I made a new release of the chronicle blog compiler today, and learned to hate the freshmeat.net website a little more.

The only real change is that now each compiled blog will receive a generated sitemap.xml file containing links to every output page. This will be useful for those folk that use real titles for their posts.

Nothing too much to report upon, although I noted with interest Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho's recent forum installation.

I love the idea of having a forum be a mere wrapper around a real transport system, which supports threading natively - but as I said almost a year ago I'd have done it using Mailing lists and/or Maildir folders....

ObFilm: Brief Encounter.

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