All posts in the topic Revised Digest Format (Short link)
Summary
- There are 12 posts — by 7 authors — in this topic.
- Latest post made by Steven Clift at Jan 16 01:08 UTC
I think that we (E-Democracy.Org) have probably brought this up in this space before, but we'd like to revamp the way our digests are formatted. In fact, I think that we may have two volunteers willing to help us do this locally. I'm hoping it turns out to be a relatively simple process. We have a rough template of what we'd like the revised digest to look like, but are open to other ideas. See here: http://pages.e-democracy.org/Digest_template I suspect that our volunteers have some questions about where to begin. Hopefully, they will post them here - unless we are advised of a better place to have this discussion.
On Fri, 2007-10-19 at 17:39 +1300, Tim Erickson wrote:
> I suspect that our volunteers have some questions about where to
> begin. Hopefully, they will post them here - unless we are advised of
> a better place to have this discussion.
I will put on my GroupServer Development Participation-Coach hat
(it is white, with a wide brim, like those worn by umpires in
cricket.)
If anyone is interested in hacking GroupServer, posting to this group is
the place to start. All the core developers are in this group, so almost
every question can be handled. If the discussion becomes too technical
for this public group, the hackers will be joined to the private
GroupServer Team ☺
Hi Michael, I'm interested to know how I could start looking at the groupserver
system to learn more about how I could play with it. Ideally, I'd like to
create a VMWare image of a groupserver site so I could play with the system in
a reusable way and have something I could give to others so they could try out
some changes I made easily.
I'm familiar with Plone development which I have worked with for a few years,
and have read the "Web Component Development with Zope 3" so I know a little
about the Zope world - although I agree I've been sheltered with having Plone
there all this time.
If I had the source code or a development environment - with something like
buildout - I'd be interested in seeing what the Groupserver application looks
like. Would sending me the latest source be the answer? Or maybe you have a
development environment you have for your developers? Thanks!
Tim, brought it up that there could be some customization and added features
for groupserver, but I am weary of hacking a site while it is running or doing
stuff through the ZMI instead of the file system.
On Mon, 2007-10-29 at 05:33 +1300, Eldon Nelson wrote:
> If I had the source code or a development environment - with something
> like buildout - I'd be interested in seeing what the Groupserver
> application looks like. Would sending me the latest source be the
> answer? Or maybe you have a development environment you have for your
> developers? Thanks!
Hi Eldon:
I'm not sure if you're on the Groupserver Team list (if you aren't, we
should probably look at getting you on there), but we've been discussing
slipping several items from our current milestone in order to prioritise
getting a decent build environment released (as a pure alpha ... those
using it for real data will not be provided with a migration path to the
final release).
I'd estimate that this project (the buildout) is at about 80% at the
moment. I'm away for a week but I'll give it a final push in the week
following.
I don't believe I am on the Groupserver Team list, but I'd be
interested in testing out your buildout environment.
With respect to the Digest Format itself, by the way, and now that our issue tracking system is open, I'll mention that the main change on our wish list for the digest, is to include keywords for each topic in the notifications. Keywords in Topic Digest http://svn.iopen.net/projects/groupserver/ticket/195 The primary user task for the digest is to find out what is being discussed in a group, without viewing posts, either by email or the Web. The keywords provide valuable information about what is actually in the topics, which is often not discoverable from the topic title. This is of particular value to users who are not already familiar with what is being discussed in each topic. The keywords for this topic is not a bad example, though of course they may change once I submit this post. At present, they are as follows. * groupserver * development * environment * interested * system * group You can see that this reflects the fact that so far, we are actually discussing the development environment, rather than the digest format. You can see the keywords on the group index page for now, and permanently in the results for a topic search on "revised digest". http://groupserver.org/s/index.html?s=%22Revised+Digest%22&t=1&p=0&f=0&r=0&gs=%5B%27%27%5D&g=&a=
Another useful tweak with digest would be a preview option somewhere on the
site. This might simply be a help file or generated by group to help user
select it.
Good suggestion, Steve, but I suggest that the problem with message preview is
bigger than the digest: there should be previews available for all of the 30
different notifications sent out by GroupServer.
The "From" on digests is currently an arbitrary address. What should it be? My
current thinking is that it should be the list address for that group, so that
unsubscribe requests can be as simple as hitting Reply and setting the subject
line.
Richard, any thoughts?
On Wed, 2008-01-16 at 11:12 +1300, Alice Murphy wrote:
> The "From" on digests is currently an arbitrary address. What should it be?
My current thinking is that it should be the list address for that group, so
that unsubscribe requests can be as simple as hitting Reply and setting the
subject line.
>
> Richard, any thoughts?
It should definitely *not* be the list address IMO, because while that
makes unsubscribing a lot easier, what it actually does is lead to
people replying to topics without changing the subject. So you end up
with a bunch of things in the Topic Digest subject (I've seen it on
almost every list I've been subscribed to that has digests).
There are two ways to address this that I can see:
1: make the reply-to address the participation coach (short term fix),
2: detect an unchanged 'Topic Digest' subject, and issue a reply (with
the original message) pointing out the error in their ways (longer term,
and better fix). This actually wouldn't be that hard, since we already
detect other events (like subscribe, unsubscribe, digest on, digest off)
and we already have a notification framework.
Another solution to unsubscribing people from digests is to provide a
"mailto:" link:
mailto:<email obscured>?subject=Unsubscribe
That should work for most people.
Speaking of the revised digest format, folks suggested we wait until we received some upgrades. Do we have what we need now for our new tech volunteer to try and implement some the ideas here: http://pages.e-democracy.org/Digest_template