[ABD] foum-mailing list bridge

[uckelman]

Modification Name: forum-list bridge
Author: uckelman

Modification Description: Provides a bidirectional bridge between phpBB forums and mailing lists
Modification Version: no assigned version number, yet

Requirements:

• MySQL
• a mail server
• PEAR modules: Mail, Mail_mimeDecode, Mail_RFC882, Log
• Perl
• Perl modules: LWP::UserAgent, HTTP::Request::Common

I've recently developed a bidirectional forum-mailing list bridge because I could no longer wait for a Mail2Forum release compatible with phpBB3. My bridge is already in use at vassalengine.org, so has had some real-world testing. I'd be happy to have help from anybody who is interested in doing further development.

[heredia21]

Can you explain what this mod does a little bit better.

[uckelman]

Can you explain what this mod does a little bit better.

Sure. A list-forum bridge connects a forum to a mailing list. Messages sent to the mailing list are posted to the forum. Posts to the forum are sent out as messages to the mailing list.

[heredia21]

Interesting. When will this be available to test?

[uckelman]

Interesting. When will this be available to test?

I need to write a small amount of documentation first, otherwise no one would be able to figure out how to set it up. I might be able to do that early next week.

[heredia21]

Sounds good.

[darkonia]

nice idea

[uckelman]

You can get the source via SVN,

Code: Select all

svn co https://vassalengine.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/vassalengine/site-src/trunk/bridge

or download a tarball from the web interface:

http://vassalengine.svn.sourceforge.net ... /?view=tar

I've had a bit of time now to write up some instructions, which I've put in INSTALL. Everything is very much tailored for my particular site right now; you might find that things which work for me don't at all work for you. I'd like to have some help ironing those things out.

[heredia21]

So it is ready to be installed on another board?

[uckelman]

So it is ready to be installed on another board?

I know I could install it on another board. Whether I've explained it well enough in the INSTALL file for someone else to do it remains to be seen. Give it a try, let us know how it goes.

[slammaster]

I am very, very excited about this, as I've been beating my head against the wall fiddling with m2f.

I'm going to check it out now, so I'll probably be in touch with questions (or hopefully comments and additions).

[uckelman]

I am very, very excited about this, as I've been beating my head against the wall fiddling with m2f.

I'm going to check it out now, so I'll probably be in touch with questions (or hopefully comments and additions).

I'm glad to hear somebody else is interested. I look forward to hearing about your experience with it.

I know from use on my own forum that there are a few areas which could be improved, namely:

* There's some non-BBCode markup which still makes it out to the list. I've been collecting messages which contain examples of this, with an eye to fixing them sometime soon.

* Subjects could be handled better. Right now, we get a pileup of tags indicating forum and list names. These should be trimmed, but how to do it so that text which is identical to a tag, but actually a bona fide part of the subject, remains untouched is not obvious to me right now. (You can see examples of this in any thread at my forum which has more than a few posts.)

* There's an encoding problem where some incoming emails end up with strange characters in them on the forum. Right now, on my forum, they all seem to come from one person, and every message from that person is this way. That should make it easier to determine what the problem is.

You can see both problems #2 and #3 in this thread.

I would love to have some help sorting out these issues, as this is really a secondary project for me. (The project which uses my list-forum bridge is the one which takes up most of my development time.)

[uckelman]

* There's an encoding problem where some incoming emails end up with strange characters in them on the forum. Right now, on my forum, they all seem to come from one person, and every message from that person is this way. That should make it easier to determine what the problem is.

I switched from using Mail_mimeDecode to mailparse for handling incoming mail, which I believe got me a solution to this problem for free. (The motivating factor was that Mail_mimeDecode fails to extract any content from parts of type multipart/alternative, which is a huge problem.)

So, if you're trying out the mail bridge, update to what's in the repository now.

[uckelman]

I've just made some changes to accommodate In-Reply-To headers which contain more than just a message ID. If you're using the list bridge, please grab these fixes from our source repository.

Also, please let me know if you've tried the list bridge, and if so, what your experience has been like.

[rcarcamonster]

Hi! I also want this for my phpBB3. Thank you very much. Were is your final link for testing the mod?

Thanks