[Mailman-Developers] Regarding Subscriber profile pages project

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Ashish Kumar writes:

 > 1. Use of different email addresses - so called aliases - for sending
 > emails: This is a good point as a user perspective. We will give user an
 > option to save an email address and out of the entered email address we
 > will ask which email address he/she want to use for sending email. I think
 > we can extend this feature for moderators and owners too.

I don't see how you plan to do this.  Picking the right alias is a MUA
function, not a list function.  Please be more specific about the
workflow you have in mind.  "Have aliases" sounds good, but what does
this mean for the user's actions and the system's responses?  If you
just mean multiple subscriptions under different addresses, Mailman
has always allowed that (it's impossible to prevent), and made it
convenient by providing a "no mail" flag for the address.

 > 2. Dynamic list: It is also another idea for subscribers.

This is a separate project.

 > 3. There is also a feature about essay. The essay feature can be enabled by
 > the list creator when creating the list, and at the same time the list
 > creator can choose which questions to ask. The default when enabling this
 > feature are the questions used for the Systers maillist but by simply
 > editing the field with the questions the list creator can choose to have
 > other questions instead. [ Reference : Above link]

I think you'll find that editing is not so simple.  Users will not do
this right.  Many cannot handle simple formatting rules like
reStructuredText or Markdown.  So you will need to provide an
interface that automatically numbers the questions, allows the user
to insert, delete, edit, and reorder questions, and "cleans" the
question (eg stripping leading and trailing whitespace) as well as
allowing an optional/required setting per question.  Bonus points for
a device that allows the questions asked to depend on previous
answers.  Perhaps content length constraints (maximum for most
questions, minimum for essay) per question.  Image uploads (must be
able to validate!!)  All answers must be validated.

 > I have a doubt if essay feature can be part of subscriber's profile
 > page.

Yes, it should be.  Systers has been a good citizen in our community,
it would be bad if we borrowed some of their ideas but didn't provide
a pretty complete set of their features and they had to continue their
fork just to get basic features.

Barry also has dreams of making Mailman a community center that
obsoletes web fora and maybe even Facebook.  Even though we were just
joking when we talked about that, I think these features make a lot of
sense for many communities, not just Systers.

Please submit a proposal on Melange, addressing most of the points
above.  If you're still not sure this is the project you want to do,
check GSoC but I believe you're allowed to submit up to 5 proposals
total and no rule against more than one to same org.  If you feel very
unsure  about it, say so, but putting it in Melange makes it a lot
easier to manage because it's a single design and plan.  ML
discussions without such a focus don't work well.