Mailing Lists For The Win!

From: Vinnie Falco (vinnie.falco_at_[hidden])
Date: 2023-05-02 15:51:43

On Tue, May 2, 2023 at 1:26 AM Dominique Devienne <ddevienne_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>> Good thing that's not happening to Boost
> ...
> given the lets-built-it direction, although I know it's most likely in vein.

I want to say this clearly for everyone:

THE MAILING LIST IS NOT BEING TOUCHED

I very much regret that I did not make this clear, so I will provide
more historical background into what we are trying to do.

At first our idea was to use an off-the-shelf Django forum (called
"Machina"), and add a mailing list interface to it so that people
could participate in the forum the same way they do on the lists. And
the forums would mirror the mailing lists, in the sense that there
would be "Developer's Forum", "User's Forum", and "Announcements."
>From the perspective of mailing list users, nothing would change. We
would import the entire mailing list archives into our forum database,
so that forum users would have the same history of posts.

We ran into some problems with this:

1. The software did not support a threaded view (flat only, which sucks)
2. The mailing list implementation has quite a few annoying little
details which you have to get right if you are writing it yourself and
you want subscribers to have the same experience
3. The system of replying to posts from the mail API could not be made robust

Several weeks ago I checked in on the status of the forum and I saw
that we were not going to be able to deliver it using this solution,
and thus we canceled it. So that the entire website is not held up
because of a missing feature we scaled back our plan to the following:

The first iteration of the forum would simply be a nicely styled
version of the mailman archive. Basically you would see this using the
website's graphical theme:

https://lists.boost.org/Archives/boost/2023/05/index.php

This is being worked on and almost ready, we are testing the imports.
Now of course the problem here is that it is READ-ONLY... no one can
post, except by using the mailing list interface. But at least it is
integrated into the website and we can tweak it. For example we can
implement full-text archive search with showing results as you type.

We still believe that offering an additional web-based interface (i.e.
"forum") to the mailing lists would attract new audiences, but since
the community has made it crystal clear that the mailing list must
remain as-is, we set about to implement an integrated forum but with
one additional constraint:

- We must continue to use mailman3 as is done currently, so that
mailing list users retain their experience

Well this sounded impossible but the folks doing the work for us
pulled through along with Sam and we have come up with a strategy on
how to communicate in both directions with the running mailman
instance so that messages posted to the forum can be sent to the list,
and that messages which are posted to the list will appear in the
forum. It helps that both our site and the mailman 3 software are
written in Python.

Now I am not particularly knowledgeable on these technologies so I
can't explain it fully but I am assured that this solution will
guarantee that the mailing lists are untouched, and that the forum can
be made to work.

This will take additional time so it probably won't make it into the
initial cut of the website, but we will at least be showing read-only
archives for now. And the mailing list will remain as-is, forever.

I hope this settles the matter :)

Thanks