I'm cross posting this to the old RB NUG and the new declaresub lists. As much as I hate cross posting, I wanted REAL and others on the NUG to know about our experiences as well as prompt discussion 'off-NUG'.
We use PHPBB and M2F on our ColorForums.com site and it works pretty well. Like most things open-source it takes a bit of learning and configuration / fiddling. What I wanted for the forums was email AND web access to the same information with no loss of function for either user type (and I strongly agree there are two different user types - if not user modes). As an 'expert' I tend to monitor many different mailing lists on several topics and it is not possible to do this on a web forum, but I do appreciate the need for the more casual user to breeze by a forum and search for answers - also Google picks them and and makes them available to a wider audience. PHPBB is a reasonable open source web forum package but the only email support it has is the old 'watch this topic' which obviously is NOT what us 'emailers' need. M2F is a separate add-on that forwards all forum traffic to an email list and pulls all incoming traffic out of a POP mailbox and posts it to the forum. One POP mailbox is required for each forum you want* Users sign up on the website to get into the forums and then sign up for the mailing list to any particular forum. Then they'll get all email for that forum. It has an interesting wrinkle in that it uses the reply-to field to track which topic a particular post goes to when it gets put into the forum from email. What this means is that if you do the lazy reply-to-get-a-new-post method that I use, your reply will go into the message's original topic rather than creating a new one. So new emails should go to the correct email address but be created fresh. We put this at the bottom of email and haven't had any problems yet. Oh yeah, the version we used doesn't do digests but we haven't updated it in a while so it might now.. Hope this helps.. Regards, Steve Upton <soapbox> PS - oh yeah, and for my 2 bits - REAL should move users over to a dual-function (like I discuss above) forum/email system so each user type is satisfied. It should also happen over a longer period of time than 1 week. Many of us are professionals using a professional resource and it is unprofessional to pull the rug out from underneath us. </soapbox> ________________________________________________________________________ o Steve Upton CHROMiX www.chromix.com o (hueman) 866.CHROMiX o o ColorGear ColorThink ColorValet ColorSmarts ProfileCentral ________________________________________________________________________ -- _______________________________________________ Unsubscribe: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> REAL Software has decided to consolidate this mailing list with the online Forums. On Monday, February 12, 2007, this mailing list will no longer be active. We encourage you to continue your REALbasic and REAL SQL Server discussions on the Forums. If you are not presently a member of the forum, please sign up today at <http://forums.realsoftware.com>.
