[Mailman-Developers] Web Posting Interface: Additional Features.

[Ian Eiloart]

On 29 Apr 2013, at 09:39, Peter Markou <markoupetr at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello everyone in the community. As you may or may not know,
> I've applied a proposal in Melange for Web Posting Interface.
> The description of the project idea states: "the interface
> itself may not take the whole summer", so I've come up with
> some features that I would like to implement for Mailman web
> interface. These features are listed below: **
> 3.) Keyword Summary,
> 6.) User Profiles(support for name, photo, bio, past posts & files,
>     statistics about how people post),
> 10.) Top X Threads of all-time,
> 11.) Topics to be Wary Of,
> 12.) User's Filter Tools,
> 14.) Keyword-Based Thread Browse,
> 17.) List Monthly Health,
> 22.) Mentioned in thread refs.
> 
> I would appreciate any feedback from developers/users, about
> which of them would be useful and fit well with Mailman web
> interface.

Hi,

The first thing to remember is that there are at least three types of user:

Site admins
List admins
List members

And, of course there will be a variety of levels of technical skill within each user set. I imagine that a Web Posting Interface will be for List Members. They'll need to be able to access their personal profile, list archives, and a form for composing and sending a message to the list. In my view, the essential features for that are:

1. A nice editing tool, that a list admin can configure to send ONLY unformatted text. That should probably be the default for new lists, for new members, and for new messages.

2. The tool should do it's utmost to preserve threads when a member is replying to a message, but not otherwise.

3. If the message is a reply, then the rest of the thread messages should have some visibility: to discourage members from replying before they've seen the whole thread.

4. There should be a link to a profile page, but it would be neat if the profile page could leverage some existing identity. Various options exist, but given that we have an email address, we can often get some profile information from the email service provider, for example when they're openid providers. Don't work on this until 1-3 are complete.

5. There should be a link to a list archive. An archive browser is probably a project of its own.

My view is that the keyword and topic type stuff all belong in (5), if anywhere at all. In the message posting page, they'd be unnecessary clutter.

-- 
Ian Eiloart
Postmaster, University of Sussex
+44 (0) 1273 87-3148