On Thu, May 9, 2013 at 9:19 AM, Guillaume Paumier <[email protected]> wrote: > > What I currently have in mind is a bot subscribed to the > wikitech-ambassadors list, that would post every first message of a > thread to the talk page of people who have signed up (like > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Global_message_delivery/Targets/Tech_ambassadors > ) or to a noticeboard (that would then be mostly automated). > > The bot would create a new section, using the email's subject line as > the section title, and its body as the message. It would ideally link > back to the gmane archive for that thread, so that users can read > follow-up messages there. Messages could be trimmed if they're too > long. The system could possibly also be used for other mailing lists > later. > > My intuition is that this wouldn't be exceptionally hard to implement, > but I'd like a more informed opinion.
The hard parts of such a system involve making sure the email really came from the mailing list (rather than someone spoofing a message to the bot's email), detecting the first message of a thread (witness how gmail starts a new "thread" whenever the subject line changes, or conversely how other systems don't deal well with people who start a new thread by replying to a random message in an old thread), and possibly converting HTML email to wikitext. None of which is prohibitively difficult to get to a good-enough state. Then the bot actually making the post to the wiki page is trivial. -- Brad Jorsch Software Engineer Wikimedia Foundation _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
