On Jun 27, 2016, at 9:04 PM, Jonathan Otsuka <djg...@gmail.com> wrote: > > adding a mailing list feature isn’t too far fetched. > > Has this idea been brought up before?
drh has publicly stated that he would like to write his own email server.[1] However, given Fossil’s nature, I think a web forum might be better. While I’m generally in favor of mailing lists over web forums, I do think that having a web forum system built into Fossil could offer some unique advantages over Fossil + a 3rd party web forum which could overcome the disadvantages of web forums: 1. No exposure of email addresses, hence no email spam. :) 2. Forum spam can’t be forged, violators can be banned, and their unwanted posts removed. (Subject to the same limitations on shunning as we have now, of course, so no one could make a “censorship!” cry stick.) 3. Posts would be Fossil versioned artifacts, with all the benefits that derive therefrom. For just one example, everyone cloning the fossil-scm.org repo would also get a copy of the historical Fossil forum discussions. Imagine being able to search the forums for help while offline. 4. Similarly, you could sync your Fossil repos, get on a plane, and answer forum posts in the air, then autosync them to the central repo when you get back online. 5. Many of the pieces needed to implement this already exist: tickets are nearly forum-like already, we have two perfectly suitable markup language processors, we have an RSS generator, we have a perfectly suitable DBMS, an FTS engine, etc. 6. Speaking of FTS, searching the fossil-scm.org forum archive would turn up fewer wristwatch and handbag results. :) 7. If Fossil forum posts worked more like wiki articles than tickets, you could edit your posts after posting them, with the history of the post available to prevent rewriting history. 8. Every now and then, someone will pop up on this list asking for some kind of email notification. These people often refuse to be placated by the current alternative, RSS. An automatically-generated sub-forum for each of these use cases might do the trick instead. (Commit messages with inline diffs, ticket change notifications, etc.) 9. The world really needs someone to take a second bite at the apple that Discourse tried for. That *can’t* be the best the open source community can come up with. About the only one of these that you get with a built-in email server + mailing list manager in Fossil is that it would be a platform to address #8. My sense is that drh’s wish to implement his own MTA would result in a separate piece of software, however, so you wouldn’t even get that benefit, except possibly through some kind of email gateway. [1]: https://twit.tv/shows/floss-weekly/episodes/320 _______________________________________________ fossil-users mailing list fossil-users@lists.fossil-scm.org http://lists.fossil-scm.org:8080/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fossil-users
