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?
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.
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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
On 12/17/07, bsmith messages@forums.vassalengine.org wrote:
I don’t see it as people telling you what to do. I think they are
offering opinions on what would be flexible for consumers of the data.
What’s possible or what’s pragmatic may be different than that. But
nobody ever gets anything unless they ask for it. I think waiting to
see how many users are using the mail-lists sounds like a perfectly
reasonable way to go.
You’re right… Open source is not about efficiency. Work done on open
source is at the convenience of the developers. If it isn’t
convenient and seen as advantageous to the developer it probably won’t
happen. Kind of like having multiple addresses for different
sections, you don’t see it as convenient or advantageous, so you are
not particularly interested in doing it.
Oh, and a tab and shift-width of 2 is the only way to go.
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In Enterprise, the developers support the customer; In Open Source, developers support themselves.
Could I be forgiven for thinking Open Source is virtually (no pun intended!) Socialism in software development form?!
Thus spake “Tim Byrne”:
The vassalengine-devel list goes in bursts. It could easily happen that
I would post 20 message to it in one day myself—it’s exactly that sort
of thing which prompted calls for a forum on the users list, if I remember
correctly—and at other times the list is quiet because we’re all busy.
I would like to avoid reducing the usefulness of the lists for people
who prefer to read the lists—and that’s exactly what shunting the
devel list onto the general list does for people who don’t care about
the development mail. Ditto for the Tournament stuff. I’m sure that
will generate a lot of messages, and I’d be surprised if people who
aren’t involved would want to read much of that.
This is exactly what I was suggesting way back in September. The
problem with doing it is a technical one—the version of Mail2Forum
we’re using doesn’t support using multiple external lists. What I
suggest we do until then is continue to use the developers list for
development stuff. I would go hack on Mail2Forum myself to make this
work, because I think all it amounts to is adding a few if-then-elses
to the part where the mail goes out and comes in, but I have too many
other things on desk right now.
–
J.
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Thus spake “bsmith”:
In enterprise, you’d tell customers who don’t pay you to shove off. 
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As much as it pains me to say this, I’m willing to do whatever is required to move the dev discussion to the forum. If I have to do it I have to do it but I know it’s going to be a double edged sword.
What I really want to do is start working on the code myself; But I’m not prepared to do so until we have the dev discussion in forum format.
I want to see a sticky thead at the top which outlines the exact process developers need to follow to checkout and build Vassal. I bet right now there is no quick and easy way to get this information that does not involve doing funky searches through mailing lists.
Discussing anything in the mailing list is, as far as I’m concerned, writing e-mail for e-mail’s sake, that stuff is going to get lost in a couple of weeks and the only refence we will have is “if I remember correctly”; So what’s the point?
I dont have any problem with forums going live this week once you all hash out the mailing list stuff.
I was kind of hoping though we might hold off the tournaments page till beginning of year. This would give me time during my vacation starting on wednesday to put up some info on the rules page that is clear and easy to follow - how to register, submit a game, general site area workings etc…
Thus spake “bsmith”:
I think it would involve a few changes in m2f_mailinglist.php.
It might be worth asking on the Mail2Forum forum whether 2.0 is going to
have this feature, and what the state of it is right now. It could be that
we could use the development version and it would already do what we want.
Why not?
It’s in the wiki right now. You wouldn’t find it on any of the mailing
lists. (And that’s about the build setup for Eclipse. If you don’t want
to use Eclipse, then you won’t find anything at all except the build
scripts in my dev branches.)
Two points:
-
I keep all of my mail. ALL of it. Since 1998 or so. So I can grep for
what I’m looking for. Things on the devel list are not lost, from my point
of view. I realize that most people do not do this. Searching on the forum
sucks for me because I can’t use regular expressions to do it, while I
can with grep. -
Did you know that there’s an archive of the list at Sourceforge?
sourceforge.net/mailarchive/foru … gine-devel
I’d concur with you immediately on any negative thing you want to say about
their archive setup. (Similarly, for Yahoo Groups.) I don’t use it because
I’m storing my own archive. It would be easy for me to add the devel list
as one of the lists I archive at nomic.net:
The advantage here is that they’re picked up by Google, whereas
Sourceforge’s list archvies seem not to be. That would go quite some
way toward making the information more visible.
–
J.
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