i found this thread:
i would like to find out more about what the OP did, so that would either mean (a) messaging the OP, or (b) replying to the thread. is it possible to do either? so far i haven’t been able to find a “reply” or “message” button.
does anyone have any suggestions for how i might contact that user to ask a followup question about their post? should i @ mention them?
There’s a reply button on each post and at the bottom of the topic.
If you click reply on the OP they will be notified.
yeah i’m not seeing that, only “bookmark” and “share.”
maybe it’s because i’m a new user?
Hi, that would be me. How can I help?
Hey! I was just wondering if the code for that majordomo web interface you described is published somewhere? Or maybe you could put me in touch with that person who wrote it?
I ask because I’m curious about ways of implementing web interfaces for mailing lists. Discourse’s “mailing list mode” makes it sort-of a mailing list, but the user’s email addresses are never exposed so you can’t email people off list. So I was curious how it worked on jag-lovers before you switched.
Yes and no. We used Majorcool (web, cgi) for handling list subscriptions. We used another open source tool for archiving new list messages to HTML (I’m not 100% sure of the name, but it could have been Hypermail).
All the rest, the glue that held it all together, was home-made using the LAMP stack. The source was never published and only exists in the form of the actual previous production site. It’s quite old and fairly complex, with zero documentation. It would be a huge undertaking to “untangle” it from the very specific site so it would be generic and usable on other sites.
It would be another huge undertaking to update the code to run on current versions of the tools that were used to create it.
On top of everything, the developer who wrote 90% of the code retired years ago.
I’m sorry, but I really don’t think our rickety old system would be of any use to you. That said, I think you can get quite far with Majorcool and Hypermail, if you can still find them.
fair enough. regardless of the implementation i am curious about how it worked. for example, could a single user use both the web interface and the regular email mailing list interchangeably? if a user sent a message through the web interface, would it appear as a mailing list message from their email address? or some jag-lovers gateway address? did you ever run into issues with things like dmarc?
Barely. It was a complex setup.
We kept a central user database in MySQL, allowing people web access. Every X minutes, the email addresses from that db were exported to a flat file, for use by Majordomo. The end result was that yes, a user could post from the web or email interchangeably.
And yes, posts entered via the web interface were routed through Majordomo and the mailing lists. They appeared in two forms, depending on the subscriber’s preference; either an individual email list message, or a list digest. I don’t think we ever had any problems with DMARC. This is fairly straight forward Majordomo/mailing list stuff.
In the last 5-10 years most people preferred to not receive any email list messages at all though, and instead just followed the conversation(s) via the web interface.
In short, over the 25 years we’ve been in operation we gone from being 100% email based, to a mix of email and web, to now being almost 100% web based by user choice. That said, we very much appreciate the ability to participate via email that’s included in Discourse, for the handful of email holdouts we still have.
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