[Mailman-Developers] message board functionality?

[John Viega]

Steven,

Yes, I like the idea.  Some comments:

"user option to not actually receive mail from lists"... for lists
with archiving, you can already just go and read the archive.  I know
a lot of people who do this on real lists.  You'd just have to change
the link to say, "visit the list in forum format" or something like
that. 

It does sound like Mailman meets many of your requirements already,
but not all of them.

I'd love to see this stuff get included.  Please do work on it.

John

On Wed, Jul 28, 1999 at 01:18:04AM -0500, Steven Hazel wrote:
> 
> wwwthreads, a web-based threaded message board software, formerly released
> under the GPL, is now being released under a non-free license by the original
> author.  I'm the administrator of wwwthreads for a user community, and we've
> decided to stick with free software.  I suggested to the GNU project that I 
> fork the code and work on extending and improving the capabilies of
> wwwthreads with the aim of inclusion in GNU.  After a bit of discussion with
> RMS, I'm thinking that perhaps the best thing to do is to work on GNU Mailman
> to make it capable of doing what wwwthreads does.  Many of the extensions I 
> was planning for wwwthreads (for example, integration with email and 
> optionalization of the web interface) are already done in Mailman, and I think
> that maybe Mailman could benefit from some of the additional functionality I
> am proposing.  Besides which, I'd really like to be able to deal with all of
> my email in one place, rather than having to zoom off to some web site for
> a portion of it.  I think a lot of web-based-forum users feel the same way.
> 
> So I'm writing this email to find out what you think -- is this possible?
> Is it a good idea?
> 
> My current minimum list of features needed to make GNU Mailman useable as a 
> replacement for wwwthreads (with the web-based part fully optional) is as 
> follows:
> 
> - web logins for user accounts
> - user option to not actually receive mail from lists (for those who want 
>   to read lists purely on the web)
> - web interface for posting to mailing lists
> - web interface for administrator and moderator functions
> - web appearance configurability on both an administrator and user level
> - program to convert wwwthreads databases to Mailman configurations
> 
> Of course, further features would follow those, based on what users say when
> they've switched from other forum software.  I expect that the web frontend
> would benefit greatly.
> 
> Your comments are appriciated.
> 
> -Steven
> 
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