[Wolves] Mailing lists and web forums

[Aquarius]

Last night at the meeting we talked about the web forums amd moving the
mailing list to a mail server under our control (the wolveslug.org.uk
server, specifically). I propose the following:

1. We set up a mailing list server on wolveslug.org.uk. I'm not sure at this
point which one we should be using; front-runners are mailman and smartlist,
but I'm open to suggestions.

2. We have a "main" mailing list, called general@wolveslug.org.uk. This 
will be the current mailing list, and we move everyone over to it. We 
change all references to the mailing list on the website to reference 
this new address.

3. We subscribe the general@wolveslug.org.uk address to the
wolves@mailman.lug.org.uk list (so that mail to the old list appears on the
new one).

4. We put an archive of this list on the website. (Note that the archiving
will support not archiving posts with an "X-No-Archive: yes" header, for
certain paranoid people among us :))

5. We set up a new list, called forums@wolveslug.org uk.

6. We hack the PHPNuke code so that all posts to the web forums also go to
the forums@wolveslug.org.uk list. A given web forum post should have a
uniquely generated Message-Id, and should have the computed Message-Ids for
the previous posts in that forum thread in its References header in the
email. This way, someone reading the forums as a mailing list will get
proper threading.

7. We create a script that knows how to post to the web forums, and
subscribe the script to the mailing list (so that people can reply on the
mailing list and that reply appears on the web forum).

People who want to know about the web forum stuff but don't want to keep
checking the web can then just subscribe to the forums@wolveslug mailing
list and read (and reply) there, just as they do with the current list.

Everyone's a winner. Does this seem like a good approach? Tasks 1-5 aer
system admin tasks on wolveslug.org.uk, which me or Jono will do; tasks 6
and 7 are ideal for anyone who's interested in coding, particularly web
coding. 6 will require PHP skill and PHPNuke skill, or ebing prepared to
pick those up. 7 can be done in any language you like, because it's a script
which only has to accept a mail on stdin and post that mail's text (with
appropriate headers) to the web forum.

Aq.

-- 
from string import *;import re,base64;w=base64.decodestring('YXF1YXJp'+
'dXNAa3J5b2dlbml4Lm9yZw==');u='['+lowercase+']';print re.sub(u,'-',w)
while filter(lambda x: x in u,w): s=raw_input('Letter:');u=filter\
(lambda x: x != s,u);print re.sub(u,'-',w)