[Mailman-Developers] Discourse Integration

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Vaibhav Lohani writes:
 > Stephen J. Turnbull <turnbull.stephen.fw at u.tsukuba.ac.jp> wrote:

 > > What sort of integration do you have in mind?
 > 
 > The idea is to have a two way binding sort of integration, where the
 > conversations can be carried out in discourse as well as mailing list
 > mode.

The big issue here is that Discourse provides a centralized server,
which means that conversations can be serialized properly, and you can
even be notified if somebody else is replying at the same time.
Mailing lists are asynchronous, so that posts often "cross in the
mail".  While these two modes are *fundamentally* incompatible, so
cannot be perfectly merged, it's important that the two systems behave
as much like each other as possible.  In particular, you can't assume
that mailing list subscribers will be using a browser.  Many people
use dedicated mail clients.  Also, once you've got the basic syncing
functionality down, it would be interesting to see if you could
provide a mail protocol for manipulating Discourse features (likes,
badges, etc) via the email interface.  (This might be almost trivial
if Discourse already provides such a protocol for email.)

 > the mailman rest api should not be opened publicly,

The Mailman REST API is there to be used.  The problem is that access
is not authenticated at this point: anyone who can access it has the
run of the installation.  So everybody who has access to the REST API
is effectively the site manager.  Since you are planning to host the
Discourse and Mailman instances on the same server, this should not be
a problem.  But you should be aware that that Mailman API will be
firewalled from the Internet in any public instance for the
foreseeable future.

Hope this helps.

Steve