Floral Arrangement - Version 2

Discussion group technologies used by FLORA

The version 1 documentation is online and describes some of the current technology in use and some ideas of what I was thinking in 1997. Much has standardized around these technologies since that time and thus the direction has changed.

One thing that has been a problem is that the differing technologies have not integrated well. Mailing lists and newsgroups work great at distribution to other sites, but common tools for participating on FLORA itself are needed. To this end a movement towards a database of articles will be used.

Centralize discussion groups

• messages stored in MySQL database
• messages indexed from and 'archived' (IE: when not indexed) in XML format (Allows for faster searching of 'current' documents, while still being able to pull up old articles).
• Message importers for RFC-822 messages (IE: Automated imports from existing mailing lists and existing newsgroups - converts to XML and then indexes into database)
  • Support for existing URL styles should be kept, and old messages imported. URL's so far exist in the following formats
    
    • /$newsgroup/$message-number - Used by Web-based newsreader for the flora.* newsgroups
      
    • /monthMMYYYY/msg######.html - Used by MHonArc archives of mailing lists such as: alt-transp, homeschool-ca, pednet, challenge-l, ottawa-challenge, lynx-dev
  • Message-ID's in database as one of the criteria for searching, which along with references lines will allow the building of threads.
• Message exporters to RFC-822 messages (Possibly both text/plain and text/html format). People should be able to subscribe to these discussion groups in a variety of formats such as 1-article/1-message, full-digest (IE: You receive the body of the messages), link-digest [only has subject/auth/summary and a link], etc.

Channel and group support

Existing mailing lists and newsgroups can easily be imported into a new format. There is, however, a need for another higher level where short descriptions, better titles (No "Re: some other topic"), and a reference to the full text is needed. There is also a need to be able to publish links to other sites, upgrading the flora.announce (and other related announce groups) to something similar to what is offered on linuxtoday

• Support for "channels" in the Rich Site Summary format. Should have the ability to both import (From other locations) existing channels as well as export. WebReference.com has quite a bit of documentation on RSS. RSS is essentially an XML Document Type definition, and RSS is defined by netscape as RSS 0.91.
• General tool for displaying channels. I have set up a demonstration of some feeds. which uses simple rsslib php functions.

• Moderator tools (IE: be able to moderate groups, change group status of existing messages, etc. One should be able to easily read an existing mailing list via a tool and then be able to mark a message as "To be hilighted via Channel" with them only needing to add in summary and possibly fix up a better subject.

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Last Modified on 2000/08/28 16:24:36UTC by RWM