Re: Using MHonArc as more than an archive?

[Harshal Chhaya <harshal@mumbai-central.com>]

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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