Features / Usability

Posted by Gary Cunningham-Lee 26 Mar 2004 04:20 GMT-0000 posts: 4662

I've been trying out the forum-mailing list gateway feature for a few Tiki upgrades now, hoping it'd get to the level that I could use it with some majordomo mailing lists, but there are still problems in 1.8.1:

• Posts made at the forum generate a second, Anonymous post in the same thread, dated a few minutes later. This post by Anonymous doesn't appear in the page refresh following my post submit, but appears when I leave the thread and come back to it again. The subject line of the Anonymous post is the thread title, and the body is the same as in my original post, except that my post's subject line is printed as the first line of the body.
• Posts from the mailing list do not retain their original subject lines; they don't have a "Re:" appended if they are replies. They all are given the thread topic as subject line instead.
• Majordomo bounces mail other than subscriber names, so I have to put a list subscriber's email address in the "Originating e-mail address for mails from this forum" box. I didn't want to use an actual subscriber, so I used the exclusive POP box that Tiki checks for incoming list mail. Thus, subscribers see that box address in their "from" fields for this list's mail posted at the forum. And replies to such messages get an auto intro like "Chibaguy's_Tiki_forum_box wrote:" instead of stating the actual author. Of course with normal messages (submitted to the list by subscribers via email), the original writer's email address is shown. Feature request: Replace the "Originating e-mail address" config box with code that would get the Tiki forum user's email address! This would enable forum posts to look and work the same as messages sent normally on the list.

As things stand, maybe a forum can function as a read-only archive for a mailing list, but posting from the forum creates problems both for email participants and for subsequent forum thread behavior, etc., unless I'm missing something in the way I've set things up. Sorry to sound so negative; let me wrap this up by saying I really appreciate the work that has gone into this feature, and am just responding to try to help it improve.

-- Gary