[MeeGo-community] [Meego-community] email/forum integration is not important - was Re: MeeGo Forum is now live! - http://forum.meego.com

Mon Jun 20 05:14:23 PDT 2011

On Thu, Apr 8, 2010 at 14:12, Reggie Suplido <rsuplido at gmail.com> wrote:
>
[Discussing forum<->email integration to allow mostly offline people,
or people who prefer push mechanisms, to participate in
forum.meego.com]
>
>> Is there a drawback?
>
> Yes, there are actually several.
>
> 1. Note that the forum email integration is NOT a bridge to the list.
> It is an entirely separate alternative that aims to replace Mailman.
> Are we ok with that?

Consensus was yes.

> 2. In order to 'subscribe' to a forum, a member needs to go to the
> forum, and mark which forums they would like to get 'instant email
> notification' from. At talk.maemo.org, not all developers had forum
> accounts and based from some discussions before, they would never want
> to be involved with the forums at all, which made it hard to implement
> the system. At MeeGo, it's a bit different since SSO is in place.

As noted, not a problem here.

> 3. Titles/Subject of emails will be padded with the forum name plus
> the thread ID (e.g. [Application Developer Support-t-123456] This is
> the actual title of the post]). t-123456 is how the system knows where
> to append replies within the forum. There was a bit of a discussion
> several weeks back to remove the tags on the emails from the lists. If
> we implement this, we have to the tags there, not to mention the
> cryptic 't-123456' suffix. Is everyone ok with this?

Some technical approaches were suggested to improve it for v1.5.

> 4. Related to #3, when you create a new thread via email, the system
> will send you the same email back with the tags in place. or some,
> they might find this irritating. Also, if you decide to change the
> title and remove that system generated tag, it's a prompt for the
> system that you are creating a new thread. I expect this to happen
> often as folks will get irritated with the long tag on the email
> subject. They will remove or rename the subject, not knowing that that
> the forum will create a new thread (and they wouldn't care since they
> don't visit the forums anyway). For those pushing for email
> integration, I do hope you intend to volunteer to be moderators (and
> stay as moderators for years and years) to help merge threads, as this
> problem will happen often.

A fair point.

> 5. The system sends the emails via vBulletin's scheduler. The minimum
> time it can be set is every 10 minutes. That would mean, a reply that
> you sent via email can take a while before you get a reply back.
> Compare this with Mailman which is instant.

This sounds like something we'd want to look at addressing in v1.5 or
v2.0 as well. Is the source code available for people to contribute &
assist?

> 6. Strain on the server. Note that all this will happen on the same
> forum server. At talk.maemo.org, traffic up to server capacity several
> times a year. During these times, if the email integration is
> implemented, the server will be queuing emails as well for every reply
> made in the forums and via email. This can definitely crash a server
> during peak times. The MeeGo forums is currently running on the same
> talk.maemo.org server as new servers are setup at OSU. There is no way
> the email integration will get implemented until a more capable server
> (especially if we are implementing email integration) for the forums
> is allotted. This is actually the main reason why I have fears of
> implementing the system at TMO.

As noted by David's email[1], the OSU migration is complete and the
MeeGo IT team are managing the infrastructure for the server. Load
shouldn't be a problem, but again - if it is - if the source is
available, maybe we can assist.

Can we have an update from Reggie, the CO & the IT team as to the next
steps? I know myself and many others would be aware of forum.meego.com
content a lot more if it was being pushed at us in our email clients
:-)

Thanks in advance,

Andrew

[1] http://www.mwkn.net/2011/25/community.html#community-3

-- 
Andrew Flegg -- mailto:andrew at bleb.org  |  http://www.bleb.org/