[Major feature] Post by email February 23, 2013, 01:23:35 pm In case you were wondering, in the past years, what forums should do, to take over the world again, this is what I think: integrate with mailing and social applications. Give people the freedom to use their own tools, on their desktop email clients, or in their browsers, and still cozily participate to a community.Don't force them to register or login on a bookmarked site, don't force them to come back to the site and post. Let them roam around with their own tools, their email clients, their preferred way of communication, their preferred sites even, and still welcome them as part of your community.Spuds has implemented the most awesome functionality for Elk: post by email. He did the hardest work on the security implications, email parsing, headers, difficult and inconsistent standards, and the essentials of their integration with the forum.Now, you can treat the forum as a mailing list, if that's what you're comfortable with: after all, they're both tools to communicate, to discuss, to argue, to flame and to build friendships and to work together.It is, IMO, one of the biggest lacks for forums today (and for the last 10 years for that matter) that they're unable to see themselves as what they are: nice interfaces for communication. Among other interfaces for communication.Please see documentation for the feature:https://github.com/elkarte/Elkarte/wiki/Maillist-FeaturePlease see pull request:https://github.com/elkarte/Elkarte/pull/153Our turn now. This is a major feature with critical implications:It needs our testing, our help with documentation, our bug fixes and additions. Spuds says it's in a state where it still needs work, please see above.We want Elk 1.0 to make huge leaps to lead the way on what forums will be in the next ten years. This is one of them.Do note: This feature is intended for advanced users.Not everyone will want to switch it on. But flexibility means to offer the real possibility to do what you want, not only the basics. Or we'd all walk around with 15-instructions BASIC algorythms. (anyone here remembers those? ;))We are the first forum software, to my knowledge, which has actively pursued forum-mailing lists integration, even before we move to social integration (the newly disclosed discourse seems to try something similar in the past month). People will find in Elk the functionality they need, and yearn for, for years.Lets make it the awesome thing.Notes for contributing and testing:Directly checkout Spuds' branch: https://github.com/Spuds/Elkarte/tree/PbETo check out the pull request, you may find this bit useful: https://gist.github.com/piscisaureus/3342247
Re: [Major feature] Post by email Reply #1 – February 23, 2013, 03:46:06 pm Antechinus gets out telescope............... Antechinus searches the furthest reaches of the galaxy for a glimpse of a possible release date.............
Re: [Major feature] Post by email Reply #2 – February 23, 2013, 04:29:47 pm emanuele doesn't have any good date: [acronym="Duke Nukem Forever"]DNF[/acronym] has been released a long time ago, 21st December 2012 has gone...what's next?
Re: [Major feature] Post by email Reply #3 – February 23, 2013, 04:37:00 pm Well at least if you want to add stuff like this, it'll give me more time to work on the theme. Lots more time. *BTW, not saying it's not a good feature, but Feature Cat seems to be getting very well fed.
Re: [Major feature] Post by email Reply #4 – February 23, 2013, 05:01:15 pm Did you ring? Dis is yummy, 'n a biiig one (1600+ additions!), can't wait to chew on it!Oh, and: for who doesn't know what we'rhe doing, check out our roadmap on Github.This is the-the most imporrtant one for the dirrection of the chewy-stuff, I think? It took an unbelievable worrk to get to this stage, and I thinks Spuds made it because... because... hungrry! Feature Cat retrreats in a corrner to chew in peace.
Re: [Major feature] Post by email Reply #5 – February 23, 2013, 05:04:41 pm Brave step, very brave. I've always shied away from it because I didn't want to fart around with the routing aspects, but it seems as though you've bypassed that and are instead using an IMAP consumer rather than something like getting cPanel to route email on receipt? The only downside to that would appear to be promptness of replies.Let me know if there's anything I can do regarding testing.
Re: [Major feature] Post by email Reply #6 – February 23, 2013, 06:44:38 pm wow Spuds. Well done! IchBin needs more time to help test and finish mobilz....
Re: [Major feature] Post by email Reply #7 – February 23, 2013, 07:27:13 pm Quotebut it seems as though you've bypassed that and are instead using an IMAP consumer rather than something like getting cPanel to route email on receipt? I actually I have both options in there ATM. The cPanel pipe is preferred in terms of the email arrives and is processed, where as any IMAP processing is done on a cron or scheduled task basis, so some delay in all that.I've only done IMAP testing with Google and it worked with the exception that it does not delete the email. What it ends up doing instead is marking it as important, so not sure if that's a mistake on my part of some oddity of Google mail.I'm still considering options on how some things are processed ... the system sends and accepts plain text (avoiding HTML email since I was not sure I wanted that extra headache) but the plain text can be in markup format ... so you can send in an email bold and it will get converted both in and out . The html->markdown program I currently have is markdownify, but as I said in my PR comments, this seems abandoned and TBH is just more that what is required here due to the control over what gets sent out. If I could depend on php always having DOMDocument available I just write what I needed. Guess I could find a replacement class or perhaps simply make that a dependency ... if the host does not have that maybe its a good indicator this option will be to much for them.Anyway, any testing or reviewing you can do is welcome!Quotewow Spuds. Well done!Thanks ..... working on it made me think of lots of other things to change so items could re-used more easily (or at all) in the core ... but thats another release ! Now you need get back to work on the mobilz
Re: [Major feature] Post by email Reply #8 – October 04, 2013, 05:33:51 am emanuele thinks this has been implemented, merged and testedSo... =>exterminated!
Re: [Major feature] Post by email Reply #9 – October 04, 2013, 09:23:08 am Well two out of three (that testing bit needs more testing, but thats an ongoing thing)
Re: [Major feature] Post by email Reply #10 – October 04, 2013, 10:26:51 am Oh well...testing it for bug reports!
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