Re: [DMCForum] Moving to web based forum?

[Jon Heese <dmcforum@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

In my last job, I worked on integrating email support into a Java-based 
Web Forum solution.  In the web forum part (which was already 
implemented when I started working on it), each site was broken down 
into separate forums. e.g. DMCForum is the site; Pure Technical, Vendors 
and Product discussion, Events and show discussion, etc. are forums 
within the site.  Each forum had an email address associated with it 
(e.g. technical@xxxxxxxxxxxx, vendors-products@xxxxxxxxxxxx, 
events@xxxxxxxxxxxx), and each board user could opt-in to receive emails 
from each forum (i.e. "subscribe" to the forum).  Each time a new 
message was posted (in a thread) in a forum, that forum's email identity 
would send out a copy to all users who were subscribed to that forum's 
mailing list.  If the user replied to the email, it would post the 
contents of the reply to the "[Forum-Name] Thread Name" indicated by the 
subject line (assuming the From: address was rightfully subscribed to 
"Forum"'s mailing list).

So, to start a new thread by email, one could conceivably compose a new 
message To: "forum-email@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx", Subj: "[Forum-Name] New 
Thread Name", with email body text represented as the message body on 
the board.

Pretty simple once you break it down.  Of course, I don't know if this 
functionality is built in to ubiquitous the free CGI board software, 
though I imagine there are modules that do implement it like this.

The software I worked on was way over-priced and full of bad code and 
bugs (there before I got to it and so ugly it would've been harder to go 
back and fix it all than to just start over), so I wouldn't recommend it.

Regards,
Jon Heese

Marc Levy wrote:
> 
> --- Scott McMullan <smcmullan@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> 
>>- people should be able to make new submissions via
>>email as well
> 
> 
> Hmm.. I have never worked with the software that runs
> the forums, but I think it would be possible to allow
> someone to reply to a thread, but more difficult to
> let someone start a new one by e-mail.
> 
> 
>>- lock down the yahoo and google groups so that new
>>postings can ONLY
>>come through the appropriate channel... things would
>>quickly
>>deteriorate if we wound up with disjoint sets of
>>data in each of the 3
>>(proposed) locations.
> 
> 
> Yes, I had this expectation when I wrote my last
> e-mail, but guess I did not vocalize it well.

---

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