[swift-evolution] [Discussion] mailing list alternative

[Tyler Stromberg]

on Thu Jan 26 2017, Dave Abrahams <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
> on Thu Jan 26 2017, Nate Cook <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
>
>> ✋
>>
>> I forged the mighty, turgid rivers of rubyenv, hand-tweaked gem
>> dependencies, and sed-cleaned mbox files to try this out—you can see
>> the results of an import (using one or two day old data) at this
>> address:
>> 	http://discourse.natecook.com/
>>
>> It looks like the threads were handled properly, though they bear some
>> obvious marks of their mailing list origins. Users can actually claim
>> their accounts if they do a password reset. However:
>> 	- it's hooked up to a trial SendGrid account, which will top out at 100 emails/day
>> 	- I should probably delete this soon so Google doesn't think it's the real deal
>
>It's a shame that it has no facility for hiding long quotations.  Trying
>to find the actual content in this thread is pretty awful:
>http://discourse.natecook.com/t/strings-in-swift-4/2980/13

A few months ago I wrote a tool in Elixir to better browse the mailing list archives by thread. Demo is here (forgive the frontend dev skills):

https://swift-archive-staging.herokuapp.com

As part of that, I added support for converting posts to markdown and clipping long quotations (though sadly that has not yet been deployed to the above link). It's quite a bit of work, but ultimately it probably makes sense to clean up the data before we pull it in to Discourse (prune long quotations, convert to markdown, reparent orphan replies (such as this one), etc). If we do decide to move to Discourse (which I'd strongly support), I'd gladly put in the effort to clean up threads before we import them.

-Tyler
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