To help new volunteers feel comfortable volunteering in new operational areas, a key new feature comes to mind: boilerplate reply messages that can be easily sent to new questions coming into a list.
We've all ended up answering the same question multiple times, but even once we do checkin the FAQ, it's still more mental work to write the email pointing the questioner to the FAQ URL. For some operations areas (and possibly some users@ lists) having a simple UI for pre-written "Here's the FAQ, and this doc might be useful too" answers to send out. Would this be something easy to build by copying some of the Secretary tool, which already has reading mailboxes and creating reply features? My most needed case is a private list with a limited number of technical users, so even a tool that needed a little setup would be OK to start with. * Logged-in User UI (for this feature on a specific mailing list) - Simple web view of the mailing list; primary focus is past 30 days (doesn't need archives or much searching, since point is current Q) - User selects mail, pushes Reply FAQ, pops up a choicelist of "FAQTitle: Description text" items, choose one, OK. - Opens simple text edit with the original mail (as >orig), with the FAQ boilerplate added, and allows user to edit/add text. - Press Send Mail which auto-sends a Reply-All to the original question * Admin UI (i.e. person who sets up this feature and the boilerplates) - Checkin list of common questions with descriptions, and response file. - Each response file is a boilerplate reply - %replaceable% fields are nice, but not required I'm asking here on Whimsy since there's a chance I could help with this work here; I'm not familiar enough with Ponymail to be able to help code if that's the better solution. -- - Shane https://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/resources
