Forums v Email Discussion lists, a suggestion

Another forum

http://www.sitescape.com/forum.html

but don't worry vbulletin, don't think many will convert. It is different and "slightly" more expensive.

Anyway.. why posting?

This is the feature i liked the look of:

Users can email to a designated address, whereupon Forum will post it in the appropriate forum as a new entry.

what do you think?

lots of people out there like using email discussion lists. Personally i hate em but i think it would be possible to turn vbulletin into the ability to have both.

How does it work?

Well people subscribe to a discussion list. This is in fact a forum of your forum.

Say forum name is book talk

When someone posts a thread or a post then everyone who email subscribes to the forum gets an email with the message. Can set it up to do an email for every post, an email once a day or an email say at 25 posts (like egroups).

People can also send posts by email. To do this they send email:

forumname@yourdomain.com

now if the subject is say "Re I like Grisham"
then this post will get added to the thread "I like Grisham"

see what i mean?

This way the forum acts as BOTH a web based forum and an email one. I would love that it would be brilliant. I can think of a few egroups lists that would then convert over to my forum brining in massive traffic and massive member base.

I think the hardest bit is going to be error checking the email addresses (only from subscribed users) and making it easy for a reply to a post so that the post gets put in the forum in the correct place.

I would love to hear suggestions on this. I might install the software i just found (has a free trial) to see how it works. What do you think? I really hope someone is interested in this enough to think about making it. I would love to but please complete ignorance

Originally posted by chrispadfield
Glad people see the potential of the idea, would be a "killer" feature certainly!

Yes it sure would be.... I haven't seen any other forum software that does this, except one that has email and news group integration.... of course that package is over $1,500 and only runs on Windows. I really think this would give vB a big advantage over some of it's competitors.

-Chris

Yes it sure would be.... I haven't seen any other forum software that does this, except one that has email and news group integration.... of course that package is over $1,500 and only runs on Windows.

Which package are you talking about chris ?

Thanks,
Benj

my link in the first post i think

No, I don't think so, I think think Chris refers to a similar product.

Benj

Originally posted by Benj
Which package are you talking about chris ?

WebBoard from O'Reilly http://webboard.oreilly.com/

Actually prices have gone up since I last looked.... $1800 for MS SQL and $3000 for Oracle. When I first started out I ran on a shared copy of WebBoard, but was very dissapointed with downtime every day and the performance was slow. Then when my host tried to upgrade from WB 3 to 4, they lost half of my posts and didn't have a backup.

-Chris

Ok, i see.
Well, I found these product forums not better than product like our VB.

The advantages of these product is that they have full of stuff integrated.... but as a standalone forum, for the same price, I would still get VB.

Benj

Originally posted by chrispadfield
How would the board actually intercept emails? would it use a pop3 account and read them of that? would we need some extra server software do you think to actually intercept the email? i don't know how that bit would work.

Glad people see the potential of the idea, would be a "killer" feature certainly!

You don't need extra software. Wouldn't really be hard to implement either on Unix. Right now on most Unix systems have a program called mail installed. This program writes incoming emails to an indexed text file. By using PHP or C++ you can open the mail program, cycle through the messages and create new entries into the MySQL Database. The major trick will be reading the headers to determine if a message is a new topic or reply and attaching the replies to the proper thread.

I have done the reverse of this before, program reads a table in Oracle, sends each record as an email and them marks them as sent in the table.

Originally posted by wluke
The major trick will be reading the headers to determine if a message is a new topic or reply and attaching the replies to the proper thread.

The way I've seen this handled before is this: All emails go to an aliases like api@progresstalk.com for a new thread on the API forum, or chat@progresstalk.com to go into the Chit Chat forum. All new posts are sent out with a 'special' reply-to email address like api-34321@progresstalk.com, where API is the forum name and 34321 is the thread id. This makes it really easy to tell if it is a new post, or reply, and where it should be posted to.

-Chris

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Chris Schreiber

The way I've seen this handled before is this: All emails go to an aliases like api@progresstalk.com for a new thread on the API forum, or chat@progresstalk.com to go into the Chit Chat forum. All new posts are sent out with a 'special' reply-to email address like api-34321@progresstalk.com, where API is the forum name and 34321 is the thread id. This makes it really easy to tell if it is a new post, or reply, and where it should be posted to.
-Chris

That makes sense. Only problem with that possibly would be if you want to do an "archive" ie send out 25 posts in one email. I guess each post on that email can have listed a special reply email address for it.

--

Other thing to think about is moderating posts, deleting posts and also members. I assume that everyone will have to register the same way and then can just use either option (with checking to make sure the email came from an address).

What would happen say if user x posts a new thread and a moderator deletes it because it is rubbish thread. But then someone replies to it by email? Sort of error checking that will have to be taken into account.

At least it is sounding like it is going to be possible to implement. Looking forward to it sometime.

other thing is i use qmail as opposed to sendmail. Although my path to sendmail somehow works by sending it through qmail (i am no sysadmin! and this was done for me) I wonder if that sort of thing will make a difference in this type of case.

Just another thought.