mhonarc-users

Re: Using MHonArc as more than an archive?

2003-06-23 14:25:04

Hi Steve,


Steve Rothman wrote:
Some people might rather use a "bulletin board" type interface to a mailing
list, (ie: subscribe to the list, then put themselves on "nomail" status,
and just review the archive on a regular basis) and it occurs to me that
MHonArc is already pretty close.


That's similar to what I do on one of my lists. The archives
are public so anyone (not just list members) can follow the discussions. 
I use the <DayBegin> and <DayEnd> resources to highlight the daily
messages and build a calendar-view of the archive from the messages.

You can see how this looks at 
http://www.mumbai-central.com/grapevine/calendar.html

(the calendars are built by a perl script that greps the
archived HTML files for dates) 

On a different list, I create an Author Index and then use a
similar script to build a page that lists all the authors.
e.g.  http://www.mumbai-central.com/nukkad/jun2003/author_list.html


 
Some things I can think of that would make MHonArc even better for this kind
of use would be:

* Some sort of link on each page so that the message being read could be
responded to, back to the mailing list address, with the appropriate subject
line, from line, and headers, so it would work properly with the threading.
I guess this would require some sort of script that is executed at the time
the user clicks the link.

As has been shown, this is trivial to do with mhonarc. However,
I see a lot of list-management issues with something list this.
Do you allow only subscribers to post to the list or even
non-subscribers? What about email harvesters and the resulting 
spam? 


* Some way to (optionally) view the contents of an entire thread at a time.

Earl had mentioned that he had created a custom extension to mhonarc
that displayed all the messages of a thread on a page. He also mentioned
that all the resources and other information is available so anyone
interested in this could build it themselves.

I haven't studied the 'blog.mrc' resource file but it might do
part of what you want. The file is at 
http://www.mhonarc.org/MHonArc/doc/rcfileexs/blog.mrc.html
and other examples are at 
http://www.mhonarc.org/MHonArc/doc/app-rcfileexs.html


Regards,
Harshal

-- 
 http://www.mumbai-central.com : Where Mumbaikars meet

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