Pascal Bleser wrote:
Besides, has anyone actively argued against my and others' proposal of a bi/tri-gated solution? Are you against it?
No, I'm absolutely not against it, but I think that a) adding NNTP "gatewaying" into the discussion thread is hijacking and we should first decide whether we want to elect existing forums or put up a new one
I think that's a secondary consideration, and I have not really been considering what existing forums should or should not do. (I think it's up to the respective owners, to be honest). As for NNTP-gatewaying, it's also secondary, yet completely analogous to adding a webforum gateway, which is why I brought it up. I wanted to bring the concept of ONE forum with MANY interfaces into play because it is probably the only way to avoid splitting the community. (which as you'll all know by now is my main concern).
b) we'll still be discussing the NNTP gateway thing in 3 months as obviously there isn't a simple solution to it (do you know some shrink-wrapped software that already does it ?)
Yes. It's called lmtp2nntp and inn. That's what I use - I'm pretty certain gmane uses something similar. Every mailinglist email I receive is fed through lmtp2nntp into my newsserver which is inn. It was a little more complicated before I found lmtp2nntp. (if anyone would like a peek at how this works, I can provide individual access by IP-address.)
c) it seems it's not easy to achieve, technically and if we sacrifice this thread to discussing how to do NNTP+mailing-list gatewaying with the webforum, then we'll never get anywhere
It IS easy to achieve, and there's no need to sacrifice the thread at all. Perhaps we (you and I and others) can agree that a webforum should be gated bi-dir to a mailinglist, with an NNTP gateway being optional, pending time and resources. After all, gmane does provide a well-functioning mailinglist-to-nntp gateway, even if it cannot currently accomodate opensuse. What may not be so easy to achieve is the bi-dir gating of a webforum (phpBB comes to mind) to a mailinglist. I'll volunteer to work on that if necessary and I can also probably add some resources from my company. Is phpBB a good nominee for the forum software?
Is there already software that does it ? Is it tested, stable, secure ?
If not then drop that topic for now, we'll pick it up later, we can't wait 6 months for someone to develop it and I definitely wouldn't want Novell's openSUSE staff to be busy with doing that because there are other much more important things to do (build service, doc server).
I understand what you're saying, but I would rather delay officially sanctioned webfora and wait for the proper solution. I don't think there is any urgent need to be honest - openSUSE took long enough to get going, let's not lose direction by making rash decisions. /Per Jessen, Zürich -- http://www.spamchek.com/ - managed anti-spam and anti-virus solution. Let us analyse your spam- and virus-threat - up to 2 months for free.