Forum-to-mailing list integration

1. Henri Bergius

   Forum-to-mailing list integration

   Wed June 06 2007 11:22:03 UTC

   Hi, all!

   We've now implemented integration between the Midgard web forums and mailing lists so that users can use whichever they prefer and posts will appear on both.

   Some more info:

   Midgard mailing list integration

   Mailing lists of the Midgard project are to be accessed with a Midgard based web forum solution. Compared to regular static mailing list archives this provides some advantages:

   • Web archives can use regular Midgard access controls (for example, read/write permissions based on Midgard login or group membership)
   • Same styling as the rest of the Midgard website
   • Ability to reply and start new threads from the web

   Midgard's forum system

   The forum system in Midgard, net.nemein.discussion, is a quite regular web-based discussion forum. Conversations are grouped as "threads", into which users can write to "posts".

   All threads are displayed as a paged view in the discussion forum main page. The main page displays the title of each thread, and the information like date and sender of the latest post to the thread.

   Thread view displays all posts in a thread as a paged view. Under each post there are two buttons: "Reply" and "Report abuse". Content of posts is rendered using the Markdown system by default.

   Reply view enables users to write a new post to the thread, and quote from the previous post.

   Report abuse marks a post as possible spam, which can then be moderated away by list moderators.

   The mailing list system does not impose any browser restrictions apart to the ones imposed by the site layout itself.

   Mailing list integration

   Each new post on the web forum will send the same message to the corresponding mailing list, as defined in "Component configuration". The message will include the corresponding headers like "Reply-To" and "Subject" so that the emails will integrate nicely with other mailing list archives and threading support in mail clients. Current authenticated Midgard user will be shown as the sender of the email, including the email address they have used to register to Midgard.

   In order to include email messages sent directly to the mailing lists in the web forum a "lurker address" has been subscribed to each list. This lurker address will receive all emails on the list and upload new ones to the web forum.

   Lurker setup

   When subscribing lurker addresses to the mailing lists, there are some steps to consider:

   1. Have lurker mailbox, IMAP4
   2. Subscribe to list
   3. Setup settings so that no password notifications etc non-list traffic will be delivered
   4. setup n.n.discussion topic
   5. setup fetchmail

   Create a script to be used as MDA with fetchmail for example post2user:

   #!/bin/bash
   http_post_mda.php -v message_source -u USER -p PASS https://www.midgard-project.org/discussion/user-forum/api/email.html
   exit $?
   

   Create a fetchmail RC file for example fetchmail_user.rc:

   poll MY.IMAP.SERVER
       proto imap
       username USERNAME
       password PASSWORD
   ;
   

   Setup a cron job to run fetchmail using the RC and MDA:

   /usr/bin/fetchmail -a -s -m ~/tools/post2user -f ~/conf/fetchmail_user.rc
   

   Message delivery times

   Email is not an instant messaging protocol. a new mail created from a forum post will be sent via local SMTP and then some time later received by the list server which will take it's own time to send the message to subscribers (and again there is time delay with the actual delivery). Likely this will take something like 5-10 minutes but can take many hours as well.

   Once new list message has been delivered to the lurker address (before which it must have been delivered from sender to list server and sent onwards by the list server) it will take about 5 minutes for the import to start (inbox is polled every 5 minutes). Depending on how many pending messages there are in the inbox the import will take from 15 seconds upwards.

   Where the forums are ?

   • Developer list: http://www.midgard-project.org/discussion/developer-forum/
   • User list: http://www.midgard-project.org/discussion/user-forum/

   Access controls

   The forums are publicly readable but posting is restricted to authenticated users (dev posting only to "contributors" group).

   /Bergie

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2. a.bokovoy@gmail.com

   Re: [midgard-dev] Forum-to-mailing list integration

   Wed June 06 2007 12:00:41 UTC
   _______________________________________________
   dev mailing list
   dev@lists.midgard-project.org
   http://lists.midgard-project.org/mailman/listinfo/dev
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