Subject: [lojban] Re: BPFK: Call for volunteers: discussion board setup

From: "Newton, Philip" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 23 Dec 2002 11:14:04 +0100

la nitcion. cu cusku di'e
> I believe discussion fora are the answer.

Does it have to be web-based? One thing that comes to mind is Usenet -- set
up a private news server on which you can configure as many newsgroups as
you want. Usenet software exists for a variety of platforms and people may
already be familiar with a newsreader they like.

I think it fulfils the requirements you stated as well:

> I have some specific requirements I think we need for such software:
> 
> All the content on one topic is in the one place, and is threaded.

All content on one topic can be in one newsgroup. Good newsreaders will
thread postings; postings by bad newsreaders can sometimes be minimally
threaded at least by subject and date. Thread drift can be handled by
Followup-To and/or crossposting.

> Preferably there is some hierarchical structure of topics (so 
> there are subtopics and trees)

Hierarchical newsgroups e.g. jboske.cmavo.this,
jboske.cmavo.that.subbranch1, jboske.cmavo.that.subbranch2 etc.

> There is some way to flag posts as being of particular kinds 
> (proposed solutions, chat, whatever)

Not natively, though a subject line tagging convention (e.g. "[CHAT]") could
conceivably be used, as is common in some newsgroups.

> There is some way of extracting the text of discussion into 
> an archive readily.

I believe most Usenet server software stores articles as plain text; one
could simply take a snapshot of the file system on the server. Or use a
newsreader's export facility to dump one or more newsgroups.

> New posts to the board can be forwarded to a mailing list.

Mail-to-news and news-to-mail gateways are (I postulate) a solved problem.
(Undoubtled solved more than once in multiple different ways.)

> If anyone knows of software meeting these criteria, please 
> let me know. 

I know INN is Usenet server software. There are undoubtedly other packages
as well. I'm not familiar with any.

mu'omi'e filip.
[email copies appreciated, since I read the digest]
{ko fukpi mrilu fi mi ki'u le du'u mi te mrilu le notseljmaji}
-- 
filip.niutyn. <[email-masked]>
All opinions are my own, not my employer's.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.