<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Jan 24, 2008 6:46 AM, Anita Lewis <<a href="mailto:a.lewis@linuxbasics.org">a.lewis@linuxbasics.org</a>> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Question: Will the mailing list/forum connection still work? I mostly<br>read and write from <a href="mailto:community-support@lists.laptop.org">community-support@lists.laptop.org</a>.<br></blockquote><div><br>Good question, sad answer. Short form: no. :(
<br><br>Longer form: The only solution to list <-> forum syncing is the mail2forum package, available only on phpbb2. phpbb2 is becoming depricated (version 3 was recently released) but more importantly, it is hard to maintain. By the nature of its design we had to choose security over that functionality. phpbb requires editting the core PHP files to add features, of which over a dozen were done for the
<a href="http://olpc.osuosl.org">olpc.osuosl.org</a> forum to get it to the state it is in today, including the portal page and the mailing list software integration. This means when a bug if found and a new version released, it is extremely likely to require manually backporting those fixes to our, now unique, code. This is an avoidable nature of phpbb.
<br><br>In trying to think longer term when organizing the merge with <a href="http://olpchelp.org">olpchelp.org</a>'s forum with our own, the software we used was re-evaluated. They used vBulletin, a popular but closed-source solution, and we were on phpbb2. Setting a hard requirement of using an Open Source solution, maintainability and security (our new software distinguished between extensions and core code, making updating one or the other trivially easy) won out over the fairly awesome mailing list magic. We decided take the migration as an opportunity to swap out forum packages. There is a thread on olpc-open@ discussion the situation. Ironically, it is also on the Open category of the forum for those interested.
<br><br>Frankly, this stinks for me, too. I enjoyed being able to have email as my gateway to support questions, but I also like keeping our forum from getting hacked. In doubling our userbase of donors and XO enthusiast that can help questions under one website umbrella we had to lose the ability to access that community through email. I think we made the right decision in the end.
<br><br><br>If there are any php developers that would be interested in coordinating with me to write an extension, please contact me. We are using the Vanilla [0] forum software (26 hours and counting to the new site!!) and it should be quite doable, but it takes more programming time than I have to tackle alone.
<br><br>[0] <a href="http://getvanilla.com">http://getvanilla.com</a><br clear="all"></div></div><br>-- <br>Michael Burns * Student<br>Open Source {Education} Lab