On Tue, May 2, 2023 at 1:26 AM Dominique Devienne <ddevienne@gmail.com> wrote:
Good thing that's not happening to Boost ... given the lets-built-it direction, although I know it's most likely in vein.
I want to say this clearly for everyone: THE MAILING LIST IS NOT BEING TOUCHED I very much regret that I did not make this clear, so I will provide more historical background into what we are trying to do. At first our idea was to use an off-the-shelf Django forum (called "Machina"), and add a mailing list interface to it so that people could participate in the forum the same way they do on the lists. And the forums would mirror the mailing lists, in the sense that there would be "Developer's Forum", "User's Forum", and "Announcements."
From the perspective of mailing list users, nothing would change. We would import the entire mailing list archives into our forum database, so that forum users would have the same history of posts.
We ran into some problems with this: 1. The software did not support a threaded view (flat only, which sucks) 2. The mailing list implementation has quite a few annoying little details which you have to get right if you are writing it yourself and you want subscribers to have the same experience 3. The system of replying to posts from the mail API could not be made robust Several weeks ago I checked in on the status of the forum and I saw that we were not going to be able to deliver it using this solution, and thus we canceled it. So that the entire website is not held up because of a missing feature we scaled back our plan to the following: The first iteration of the forum would simply be a nicely styled version of the mailman archive. Basically you would see this using the website's graphical theme: https://lists.boost.org/Archives/boost/2023/05/index.php This is being worked on and almost ready, we are testing the imports. Now of course the problem here is that it is READ-ONLY... no one can post, except by using the mailing list interface. But at least it is integrated into the website and we can tweak it. For example we can implement full-text archive search with showing results as you type. We still believe that offering an additional web-based interface (i.e. "forum") to the mailing lists would attract new audiences, but since the community has made it crystal clear that the mailing list must remain as-is, we set about to implement an integrated forum but with one additional constraint: - We must continue to use mailman3 as is done currently, so that mailing list users retain their experience Well this sounded impossible but the folks doing the work for us pulled through along with Sam and we have come up with a strategy on how to communicate in both directions with the running mailman instance so that messages posted to the forum can be sent to the list, and that messages which are posted to the list will appear in the forum. It helps that both our site and the mailman 3 software are written in Python. Now I am not particularly knowledgeable on these technologies so I can't explain it fully but I am assured that this solution will guarantee that the mailing lists are untouched, and that the forum can be made to work. This will take additional time so it probably won't make it into the initial cut of the website, but we will at least be showing read-only archives for now. And the mailing list will remain as-is, forever. I hope this settles the matter :) Thanks