Re: Discourse

[Andrew Bernard]

I didn't go into detail, but I can assure you user emails are not 
exposed on the web in Discourse, but a post has to be associated with an 
account, and an account has to be verified by emailing the user, and the 
email is stored in their private profile so they can, well, receive 
email. The technical issue is that this approach means you cant get a 
response from emails defunct decades ago. And there's another amusing 
issue is that I found on import of 25 years of stuff into a GNU Mailman 
list that suddenly people started replying to topics and seemed 
surprised that they got no response (because people don't seem to look 
at dates!).

And as a last gasp, I recall when I was running the GNU Mailman lists 
that we had a web based interface to it which was half way decent. This 
may only be supported with GNU Mailman 3, I don't remember (we are on 
2). I think it is called Kitty, and it's part of the official 
distribution, or very closely associated with it. Also, there's a very 
powerful search engine available for GNU Mailman which is much more 
capable than simple text search terms in the user archive. So without 
changing anything this list could be improved using the GNU approved 
add-ons (I assume GNU approves them).


Andrew


On 26/02/2023 5:21 pm, Werner LEMBERG wrote:
> It's really a pity that such a conversion is not supported, since it
> would be extremely helpful in the long run.  However, e-mail addresses
> shouldn't be exposed in the web interface (the already existing e-mail
> list archive doesn't do that either).  The construction of threads
> rather relies on the 'In-Reply-To:' and 'References:' fields, AFAIK.