Developers of Sympa

[Mark Valiukas <address@concealed>]

Hi Olivier,

> > >   2. You should define a subroutine that htmlizes variables ('&' 
> > > changed to '&'...)
> >
> >
> > I think an extra sub in tools.pl would be an appropriate place, if you 
> > have no objections.
>
>
> Maybe the &tools::escape_html() could be extended to perform this job.

Yes, that would do it for one type (the html-ised subject line) but 
there are slightly different requirements for mailto's subject line. 
I've added &tools::escape_subject() and &tools::escape_mailto_subject() 
to handle this.

I think it's probably best to keep escape_html, escape_subject and 
escape_mailto_subject separate for now as it will mean that parser and 
rendering weirdness can be dealt with in the appropriate section without 
affecting other items. escape_html and the code that relies on it is 
pretty mature by now, but my code isn't...

I'll include the diffs for tools.pl when I get the other stuff sorted 
out, including another bug I found tonight - my code assumes there will 
be a name part to the email address line, so of course no sender shows 
up in the summary if there is only an email address part. Should be a 
small one to fix, but it means I'm still a couple of days off uploading 
my code to the bugtracking system.


(on categorisation)
> > -  an extra message header will be inserted to define the category
>
>
> It should allow "classicaly" subscribed users (ie not in digest mode) to 
> filter messages based on this header, which was the main usage we had 
> for categorisation.

I see no reason it couldn't be used for both. I was thinking something 
like "X-Sympa-Msg-Cat", unless you've already planned a better name.


> List owners will have to populate a list of categories for their list 
> via the web interface. The moderation web interface should propose a 
> menu to choose the category for a message.

This is how I was planning to do it. I've also give a little thought to 
the email moderation options, as they'll be important to some users (and 
are how I approve about half the messages for lists I moderate, so 
they're important to me too).



> It could be usefull to 
> separate category IDs from category title ; this could make subject 
> tagging easier and would allow internationalization (if required).

I'll bear this in mind. I wasn't thinking of tagging the subject line 
with the message category, as I intended the category to purely be for 
constructing the categorised summary, but a tag like [listname.category] 
could be useful for some. Given the arbitrary nature of the categories, 
and that the list owner will select and enter them, I can't see how they 
could be internationalised easily.


> How do you imagine message authors would indicate a category in the 
> message subject ?

I was thinking of filtering by particular keywords in the message
subject line - eg a subject line containing "seminar", "lecture"
etc would be tentatively assigned a category of "Lectures and Seminars"
that could be accepted by the moderator or over-ridden as part of the 
approval process.

This has the advantage of requiring no more thought on the part of the 
authors than "What is this email about?" - in conjunction with some
simple guidelines for acceptable and useful subject lines, this ought
to be enough for our purposes.

It might also be possible to automatically place messages in the same 
category as the message they're in reply to. I hadn't planned on doing 
this, as the messages on the system this is for are usually one-off 
announcements rather than threaded discussions. I imagine the threading 
code for the archives would be a good place to look for ideas.


> For subscribers that don't have filterring facilities in their mail user 
> agent, Sympa could propose categories of interrest to limit the messages 
> sent to a subscriber.

Server-side filtering... this is a great idea. It hadn't occurred to me, 
and it is outside the scope of the additions I've been asked to make, 
but I'll certainly bear it in mind as a possibility and do everything I 
can to make my code a good foundation to build it on.


> If you have question about the code design...

I'm sure I'll have lots. I already have lots of things I need to ask 
about -  the hard part is framing the questions correctly, as it always 
is. I'll probably ask a couple of things about wwsympa tomorrow, as I 
want to start on selecting categories and manual categorisation through 
the web and email interfaces - the subject line parsing and the output 
can wait, and will probably be slightly easier once I have this other
stuff in place.

On an unrelated subject, I had a question from a user about printing a 
message without all the extra stuff that shows in the web interface. I 
told her that the answer for now was to mail it to herself and print it 
from her mail client, but are there any plans for a "Print view" mode 
like many web-mail systems have? One of our reasons for adopting sympa 
was to keep a lot of mail out of people's inboxes, and a "Print View" 
mode would help us achieve that.

Regards,

Mark.