The Forum

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.

OK, I’ve made those two previous requested changes. Also set the Admin e-mail to messages-owner@forums.vassalengine.org.

Thus spake “bsmith”:

Thanks.

Posts to the forum by non-list subscribers do make it to the list,
so that works.

You can delete the two test accounts I created—uckelmantest and
uckelmantest2—since I’ve now tested what I set them up to test.


J.


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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.

The PS was added when I Edited the original post; Which would explain why you didn’t see it. :slight_smile:

I’m off to bed, I’ll be back here in around 9 hours. Hopefully by then others will have had a chance to sign-up and check things out.

Thus spake “bsmith”:

You can do that? Huh, so I could end up saying anything you wanted. :slight_smile:


J.


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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. :slight_smile:

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?

cheers

Ben

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.

rk

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Thus spake “Rodney Kinney”:

Just a note: I would appreciate it if we could, as soon as it’s practical
to do so, have different lists attached to different parts of the forum.
(I think this might be possible with the next version of Mail2Fourm.) I
don’t expect that general list users will appreciate getting all of the
developer mail, but presently there’s no way to exclude it if we use the
Dev forum. This is why I would like to keep using the dev list for the
time being.


J.


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Joel, couldn’t list subscribers use their e-mail filters to trash everything with “[Developers]” in the subject line? I’d expect that with so much traffic coming in through the forum, discussion in Developers is probably going to be minor compared to other sections.

I’m against keeping the existing developers list around unless necessary; I feel keeping other lists alive would undermine the purpose of creating the forum, which was to defragment everything. I would like to think we’re past politics and ready to move forward to embrace this thing, for better or worse!


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Let’s launch as is, but I agree it would be better to have the developer discussion separate. We used to have the dev discussions on the main mailing list, but it’s been better having them on a different list. Should be able to use the forum the same way.

rk

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Thus spake “Rodney Kinney”:

Maybe it would be worth checking out the current dev version of Mail2Forum?
I think it has that capability now, or will have, by the next release.


J.


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Except for the fact that discussions have been lost in that list. I found it very, very tedious to scour through it looking for the important stuff we discussed as recently as three months back, like file naming, directory structure, ant builds etc. In my humble opinion, this decision is a big step backwards.

I feel we’ve gone full circle here; and we’re back where we started.

The panic about normal users being flooded with dev e-mail makes no sense to me; In 10 days there have been around 12 messages sent to the Dev list! In comparison, the average user would be getting around 50 spam e-mails per day.

I don’t think Rodney is saying to use the forum for everything except
the developer list.

Joel suggested having different email addresses tied to different
forum sections. Rodney seemed to say, that he agreed, but he’s fine
with giving the Developers section a separate address to start (so
they forums can be made public).

And while lately the developers list has been low traffic, that’s not
always the case.

I think what would be most useful in the end would be:

1 mail-list per Section
1 mail-list that’s all traffic except Developers Section

That way, if someone wants to subscribe by mail to all traffic, they
go on two lists (as they do now). If they’re not interested in
developer stuff, they can do that by joining just one list. And if
they’re only interested in the “Players Wanted” section, they could
subscribe just to that list.


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I do understand what you’re saying here Tim and I do understand where Rodney is heading, but; The extra overhead of administering/installing extra e-mail lists, writing the PHP code, researching if the new mail2forum beta supports this etc. needs to be worth the time and effort, it can’t just be an ad-hoc decision made at any time. Maybe we should see how many people sign up with the forum’s e-mail list before looking into this further. If it’s only going to be 20 then I doubt the extra effort will be worth it.

In enterprise working as a sys admin, I’m accustomed to telling developers how to work more efficiently; Open source appears to work in complete reverse. I’m sorry I get so animated but it really does feel like I’m being told how to do my job, it’s like me telling you you should be formatting your Case statements with a 20 Tab indent :slight_smile: