mailing list mirror

[uragamuni]

Hi everyone. Since some time I been thinking that having all the messages of the forum saved as e-mails in my hard drive would be very handy:
- No need to have an active internet to be able to browse over the latest messages or search some old thread I'm looking for.
- Much faster search and retrieval (No need for anything coming from the other side of the world. Internet access is fast now but it's nothing compared to local retrieval).
- A much wider offer of search and indexing tools (Google desktop or any other full-text-search database system).
- Many options for displaying and arrangement on screen (Not being restricted to what the forum offers. Real threaded display, etc. I could use my choise of e-mail client or, again, a local search engine, etc. Basically endless options).
- Easier on the server: no continuous sucking of bandwidth and CPU time on the server (The forum it's being offered at no cost, let's waste the least possible resources on the server).
- Full backups of everything no matter what happens with the forum. (Impermanence! Remember buddhachat.org?).
- Etc, etc, etc...

It should be very easy to setup:
- Create a mailing list in Yahoo or Google groups or anywhere else.
- Allow anyone to register for viewing. Register yourself for viewing and posting.
- Setup the forum engine so that for every message posted here sends a mail to the mailing list with your posting account.
- Anyone wanting to have a backup/local copy of the forum, registers in the mailing list for viewing and activate the message forwarding to their e-mail account.

This adds almost no complexity or extra load the the DhammaWheel server, while at the same time providing an extra access method to the forum. What I'm proposing is similar to the forum subscriptions (or would be if subcriptions were working ), but are lighter on the server because each post would fire only one mail to the mailing list, instead to one mail to everyone subscribed to the forum (also, do forum subscriptions preserve the message threading?)

Off course this way the mailing list would be "read only", messages could only be posted through the web...

What do you think? In any case, thanks for providing this forum!

Uragamuni

PS: I work on I.T. My area of expertise is not the web thing but I'm be willing to help.

[termite]

The biggest problem is that you can't really "mirror" a moderated forum with a mailing list, because moderator changes will not update the "mirror." For example, all of the subscribers will receive copies of posts that violate the terms of service, even if the offending post was removed minutes after it was posted.

[uragamuni]

Yes, I see... Off course there's a workaround: instead of sending the mail to copy the message to the mailing list inmediately, it could be done preriodically and only post the non-banned messages that are also older that 24 hours or something like that. But that has two problems: it's a bit less trivial to implement and losses some of it's appeal (like the yesterday's newspaper, isn't it?)...

Anyway, the crowds aren't jumping over the topic to add me too messages... There seems not to be a much requested feature!

Thanks for your comment.

U

[retrofuturist]

Looks like we'll keep this one on the backburner for now.

Metta,
Retro.