Communications

[cfbsoftware]

The word thread might not be used, but when you are looking at a particular topic you can see the original message and all the replies to that topic on the same page. If there are too many on the page you can select the other pages at the bottom of the screen.

You'll find a lot of useful tips in the FAQ (top right hand corner of the screen). e.g. How do I subscribe to specific forums or topics?. It seems that sub-forum is not an option.

[DGDanforth]

I also don't understand Doug's phrase "Google Group now exists as the group BlackboxFramework". Can someone explain what this implies a bit better please.

Robert there is a Google group website blackboxframework where you can go now to send and receive messages. When you go there you will be asked to register and provide an email address where you wish to receive emails. Once you have done that you do not need to revisit that website (unless you want to). Give it a try.

-Doug

[DGDanforth]

I thought Doug did some experiments in which when he posted stuff here, the content of the post was included in the notification of activity email. Now he is saying this facility is only available after developing costly new software. Has something changed?

That option is still available as "Group notice" as a tab at the bottom of the page when you are composing a message but is unacceptable (in my opinion) because
(1) Everyone gets the message whether or not they have subscribed to a topic
(2) It puts the word "IMPORTANT" into the message unless one specifically excludes that by writing a header message.

The intent of the "Group message" is different from our desire to just send the text of the post.
-Doug

[Robert]

Hey guys, we are running out of time here. We really must get our act together.

Are we going for an email list or not?

There is a group of people who prefer not to dilute the effectiveness of the Forum(s) by having a list as well.
I can see that argument, but still have an open mind if the advantages of not having a list are more than the advantages of staying with a list. To me, the biggest reason for having a list (and a simple one with which we are all already familiar) is that we risk loosing less community members.

So I say to the no listers: "You have done a poor job of selling your position. You have only half convinced me and I think you are far from convincing the majority on the Oms list. Please either start convincing the wider world to take to the Forum - convince them it is simple, easy, effective, and has advantages to them that outweigh the learning curve and day-to-day logon /check hassel - or get behind setting up and selling an email list to replace the Oms one prior to 30 November."

We do not want to loose anyone.

Regards

Robert

[DGDanforth]

The poll I am running for the community has 11 responses to date. Google Group is leading.

[ 6] Google Group
[ 3] LISTSERV Lite
[ 1] LISTSERV
[ 1] Forum modified
[ 0] Forum only

[ 11] Total

I will close the poll on Friday 21-Nov and announce the results.
Whether the Center wants email or not the Community does.
-Doug

[DGDanforth]

The following phpBB discussions get to the heart of the issue concerning communication for those who have been using Email lists and now are faced with Bulletin Board posting. I noticed that git was mentioned as supporting email postings.

Post/Reply by Email - Integration With Email Lists

[DGDanforth]

One of the posts in the area51 phpBB discussions mentioned mail2forum. Googling I find the following
Mail2forum for phpBB 3 which is in alpha and appropriate to the next phpBB 3 release.

[Robert]

A very quick browse of the previous links makes it sound like a difficult task. Your consultant may require quite a lot of hours, even if he is very good. I don't know if we can currently afford the consultant option at $30 per hour.

[DGDanforth]

A very quick browse of the previous links makes it sound like a difficult task. Your consultant may require quite a lot of hours, even if he is very good. I don't know if we can currently afford the consultant option at $30 per hour.

I just got back the consultant's comments

Doug, I've looked into mail2forum before, for another client. The version you point to is for phpBB 2, a version that was retired in 2007. There was a development version of it for phpBB 3.0. I tried all sorts of things to get it to work for them (a nonprofit) and simply couldn't. Eventually they decided some other solutions were good enough. This included mobile access (Tapatalk). I did something similar to them to what I might have done for you: set up a custom notification system.

The problem remains of how to merge potentially rich email clients with phpBB. Email clients vary all over the place and standards are largely non-existent, but in general email is sent as plain text, HTML encoded and a mixture of both. So pulling out content in a consistent format is a problem and also giving it a correct subject and a correct poster username. If it were something easy, someone in the phpBB modification community would have written it. They like challenges. This one has too many variables to control.

In addition some sort of process needs to access mailboxes and process messages, not a simple thing to engineer.

Mark

[Ivan Denisov]

According the BlackBox Framework Center decision I have installed mailing list software on our server. I could not install LISTSERV Lite Free because of small /tmp folder size in our EDIS VPS and no ability in installer to change the default /tmp folder path. Alexander Shiryaev helped me to find open-source alternative Majordomo. Also it has no limitations for subscribers amount.

I have installed and configured Majordomo 2 for new mailing list.
The new list is: main@blackboxframework.org

To subscribe, please, use web-interface here:
http://mj2.blackboxframework.org/mj_www ... extra=main

The list is called main, because I assume that we can run more lists in future as suggested by Oleg N. Cher.


No the problem is over. I am locking the topic and moving it to archive.