One of the big objections to the new fangled tools is that things
get spread out over hell's half acre. They were in fact already
spread out before github came along because on the one hand you
have the actual mailing list, and on the other for archives,
issues, etc, etc you have the ietf site. The deployment of email
makes it close to impossible to have an integrated experience with
MUA's alone.
Forum software has been around for decades at this point though
and doesn't have the limitations of being tied to MUA UI. One
advantage of Forum style sites is that it is possible to alter the
chrome so that there is an integrated experience. For example, if
I were viewing a message and wanted to check on its veracity, say,
i could press a search button and get a popup to the list archives
right at my finger tips. All of the relevant drafts could be at
your finger tips too. If I want to see how the document has
evolved, I can diff it. If I want to see who did what and why, I
could view the check-in notes. It allows centralized navigation
without all of the clunkiness of having to find the relevant
tools. I doubt I'm the only one who just googles working group
names to navigate to charters, archives, drafts and all of the
rest which is far from ideal.
The best part of it is that nobody need be forced to use the integrated environment since a MLM->Forum gateway could be built (they probably exist already). I drew up a bit of ascii art to show how such a beast could be designed:
"Forged" New User Mail
(forum is a trusted
+-------------+ source) +-------------------------+
| | | |
|List Manager +<----------------------+ Forum Based Site |
|(IETF) | | (integrated w/ |
| | | source ctl, etc) |
| | Feed from IETF Lists| |
| +-----------------------> |
+----^----+---+ +-------^------+----------+
| | | |
| | | |
| + | | + |
| | | | | |
+-+-+--v-+ ++--+---v+
| | | |
| | | |
| | | |
| | | |
| | | |
| | | |
+--------+ +--------+
Old School User New School User
(unaffected) (all tools integrated)
Before anybody freaks out about the "forgery", lists break DKIM
signatures all of the time but in this case, we would trust the
forum mail since it would be admin'd by IETF itself so we know
it's not a forgery in the classic sense even though it wouldn't be
incoming with a DKIM signature. It would have the added benefit of
giving an interface to people who can't use external mailing lists
based on email policy settings, and would allow us to phase out
the horrible hack and security risk of From header rewriting: they
can use the new school method instead. There is tons of open
source forums out there, and they're pretty infinitely flexible,
and if doesn't do what you want, you can always fork it and hack
away.
If there's any interest, I could write an I-D with it a little bit more baked. Apologies if this has already been discussed.
Mike
