For release announcements we could probably just use a sticky thread in General Discussion, like the one in there right now; This would ensure the post always stays at the top of the thread.
We just put a Sticky up there called “Latest Stable Release” or something like that, then just update the first post as we release new versions.
But I do think we need a dedicated area for Module announcements, maybe even just Modules:General Discussion would suffice.
Have you tested what happens when a forum user not subscribed to the
mailing list posts to the forum? I.e., does their post show up on the
mailing list?
It would be good to set Mailman to deHTML messages, otherwise we’re
going to end up with a lot of quoted garbage on the forum.
About the subdomain: The first two things I’d try if I couldn’t
remember the subdomain are “forum” and “fora”, not “forums”. Once
we’ve gone public, were stuck with it, so we should think about whether
this is the subdomain we want. (I don’t think of what we have in the
plural, hence my preference for “forum”.)
There should be no effect in this case, the message should still be forwarded normally. I have not tested it yet though.
It does get rid of quoted garbage at the end of messages, I added a bunch of regular expressions to chop it all out. I’ll just see how this goes. at this stage it looks clean but I’m aware that I’ll need to adjust things as we go ahead.
This was discussed some time ago, I did mention this exact concern but I believe Rodney wanted to stick to the plural “forums”; I do agree with you here.
Ben
P.S. Where the heck does “fora” come from? Jurassic Park?
I made a test account so I could test this. As soon as I receive the
confirmation email for it, I’ll try it and let you know what happens.
The setting I’m referring to is under “Content Filtering”. It’s called
convert_html_to_plaintext. This is something that I’d exepect most list
readers would want anyway.
I spotted another potential problem just now: The confirmation email sent by phpbb has neither a From nor a Sender header, which makes it pretty likely to be flagged as spam. If there’s an admin address associated with the forum, the From should be set to that. If not, I’d suggest setting the From to messages-owner@forums.vassalengine.org, the admin address for the mailing list.
I tried to register another account, uckelmantest3, to check that the registration email From is correct. It is, so you can delete that test account as well.
I’m satisfied that things work now, with the exception of the PS from one of the messages up this thread being cut off when it went out to the mailing list.
It occured to me just now that the mail bridge makes it possible to post to a
thread without incrementing the “Views” counter associated with that thread.
This raises the rather amusing possibility of threads where there are more
posts than views.
It’s the case right now that I can see a list of everyone who has an account
if I click on Memberlist in the header. Is that something we want to restrict
to the forum admin (or at least not make available to anyone who happens to
sign up for an account)?
I’ve left it wide open for testing Joel but a short time after it goes public, when the majority of legitimate users have created an account, I’ll turn on Admin authorization. This way accounts will not be created automatically, I’ll have to check them then manually enable them.
From my experience, it’s almost impossible to stop rogue forum accounts from being created. I’m fairly convinced spammers pay students to create dud forum accounts in their spare time. I ended up asking custom questions on the login page such as “Are you an alien?” and “How many legs do you have?” with the default set to six or something similar. It would fix the problem for about two months, then dodgy accounts would start popping up again!
All I’m waiting on now is Rodney to give his final approval for the Forum to go public.
When you do so Rodney, should we start by notifying only the users on the Yahoo Group?
The forum is working fine from my point of view. I’d like to announce it and the tournaments site this week. First, I’ll create links to them from the main site, then announce to the Yahoo group. Soon after we announce, we can stop approving membership to the Yahoo Group and direct new users to the forum. After a while, we can shut down the Yahoo group posting altogether. Not sure when that will be, probably when the forum traffic outweighs Yahoo traffic by a significant margin.