 Subscription feature improvements [message #10502] |
Tue, 03 June 2003 01:07  |
mal0rd
Messages: 17
Registered: May 2003
Karma:
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Junior Member |
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Hi.
A little introduction
I discovered FUD Forum a short while ago and I love the feel. It's quite powerful and also user friendly enough. I was using Sympa, but that has an awkward registration system that the computationally-challenged can stumble over. I submitted a patch to smooth over the process a little, but they never got back to me on it, and I want to use a vanilla, prepackaged Forum.
The Issue
I feel the email integration features of FUD Forum are a little to hard to use for the user. Notably, if one wants to receive new messages via email they need to register with an external MLM (Mailing List Manager) in addition to FUD. I propose the following:
<ol type="1">
[*]There should be another level of subscription to the forum. Next to the little "subscribe" link there should be a "completely subscribe" link. When a user is completely subscribed they will receive every new message posted to the forum.
[*]The notifications sent for subscriptions to forums and topics should be formatted like mailing list emails. i.e. they should contain the following (example) headers:
[*]The notifications should have as Reply-To and From email headers an address in the "Mailing List Email" entry of the MLM section of the control panel.
[*]When registering a new account, the user should be asked which forums they want to "Completely Subscribe" to.
[/LIST] ( <- Does FUDcode support nested lists? Is this a bug? )
With these modifications a user can treat the "Complete Subscription" just like a mailing list. Only a procmail filter line must be added: no external MLM is needed. I feel this is a set in the right direction for Internet communities: a forum that can feel like a Mailing List.
If you would accept the patch I could try to do some hacking towards this idea myself, but I don't want to do the work if only I can benefit from it.
If you don't like this idea, another alternative that would suit my needs is making it easy for a user to register/unregister for a corresponding mailing list of a forum. This could be accomplished if an "Announcement Message" could contain pseduo-markup like [USERS EMAIL]. Then a link to an external script could be created that would register/unregister the user from a Mailing List. The link would look like: <a href="http://fud.prohost.org/mlm/register.php?email=[USERS EMAIL]">start receiving all messages as email</a>. This means I would need to set up an external MLM though, which I'd rather not do.
I think that the convenience associated with a mailing list should be made more user friendly to utilize. These seemingly unobtrusive changes would give FUD Forum the best of both worlds. Please tell me what you think.
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