[TYPO3-typo3org] Fwd: Solution for mailinglist archive

[TEK Development]

Hi Bernhard,

Thanks for the thoughts.

Bernhard Kraft wrote:

>
>Hmm ... I took a look at it. First I tought: Wow. Nice. If some company puts
>quite a lot of money into such a stuff it will be quite good.
>
>But then I noticed that it has the same problem as all those "let's list some
>stuff" plugins ... If you look at the page-browsing you see that the "actual"
>page (the page on which the most current items are listed) is numbered "0" (look
>at the HREF). Also theres always an always-equal excat number of elements on the
>first page ...
>
>Well ... what does this say ? For me it says: Simply no caching.
>  
>
Actually the system has a great cache. I was looking at it an hour or so 
ago, and it has good tools for managing the caching of various aspects 
of the system (users, forums, kb's, posts, etc.)

>Either you realize caching on a "sub-page" level (by caching each rendered posting
>listing row) or you have no caching at all.
>
>Because if someone posts a new entry it will get added in front of the list. This
>means that all elements on all pages get shifted backwards by one which mean you will
>have to renew the cache (if there is one :) of ALL pages ...
>  
>
Posts and threads get cached, not pages. This is a good behavior since 
you will want a thread that gets updated to rise to the top, even if the 
original thread's post was months ago. A new response to an old thread 
makes it relevant again, which means rising to the top of the list. And 
since it's posts and threads that get cached, the forum will display 
them properly, regardless of which "page" they would appear on at that 
moment.

>Since some time (I started it on the snowboard tour) I continue to code on my kb_nntp_if
>plugin which should be able to come around those "no-cache" issues. Of course you will then
>have between 10-20 (configurable) postings on the first page but this means all subsequent
>pages will not get regenerated except some "post-count" changes (which will only invalidate
>those single pages which reference this record).
>It will also have that the "oldest" page is refered to as "0" which means all google-index
>even those on the listing pages will stay valid.
>Then even real-url would be possible and would make sense ....
>  
>
The good thing about Jive is that all posts are indexed as they go into 
the db, so are immediately searchable. As for the google indexing, we 
did a search on google that would return Oracle's Jive installation and 
there were about 1.5million results. This means google is definitely 
indexing posts in the forum. And like the caching, having the posts 
indexed means a google search will return the post, not the page list 
that the post was on when the post was indexed.

>I can't work full-time on this plugin as nobody is paying it.
>
>Would the assoc be interested in such a plugin - for listing the contents of the newsgroups on
>TYPO3.org.
>  
>
I think this would be a good plugin, so I hope it becomes available. 
However, in this case we do need to provide forum-like functionality in 
addition to a kb and newsgroups, since different people require choices. 
For example, the TYPO3 newsgroups are the only newsgroups I have set up 
because there is no other way to keep track of what is going on in the 
community. All the other communities I am a part of have forums, and if 
it were not for TYPO3 having only newsgroups I would not have had to set 
up a newsgroup in my Thunderbird. I used to use KMail, but since I need 
to read the TYPO3 newsgroups I use Thunderbird. So it's not just a 
matter of listing the newsgroups, it's about providing interfaces for 
people who work differently but need to work together.

Some of the features that the Jive forum would add to the newsgroup 
would include: advanced searching using multiple criteria and 
egrep-style regexp; users can suggest posts to be added to the kb 
instead of an arbitrary filter; the ability to watch your posts and be 
notified when your question was answered; the ability to view all 
answered or unanswered threads at a glance; RSS feeds for each post, 
thread, forum or all forums and KB; users can sign up to be an "expert" 
at something so if a post goes unanswered, the expert can be notified; 
and the ability to send a quick message to another user without it being 
a reply to a post or thread.

>It would also support to be feed via a procmail.rc script like the returnmail.sh script of the
>DMailer which would allow to "react" on incoming postings and not require to set up a cron job
>which checks the groups at a regular interval (this would surely be a benefit for performance)
>
>It would also be nice to have archives going back into time more than 2-3 years (currently only
>a maximum of 50.000 messages is kept in each group - check t.english or .german for example) - not
>all 3 year documentation is outdated :)
>  
>
I agree. Since the Jive forum apparently can handle at least 1.5million 
posts (in the case of Oracle), it shouldn't have a problem with our 
newsgroups. :)

Cheers!
Alex

-- 
The tekdevelopment team
http://www.tekdevelopment.com