forum <-> ML gateway

[Jim Ohlstein]

On 4/24/10 9:19 PM, Maxim Dounin wrote:
> Hello!
>
> On Sat, Apr 24, 2010 at 09:59:46AM -0400, Jim Ohlstein wrote:
>
>> On 4/24/10 9:18 AM, Maxim Dounin wrote:

[...]

>
> I don't really understand how parsing non-Latin characters is
> related to threading.  It should be done based on matching
> Message-Id and In-Reply-To/References headers, which are
> ASCII-only.
>
> If it's done based on Subject for some unknown reason - it should
> be just changed to do correct Message-Id/In-Reply-To matching
> instead.
>

I will look into this but it seems only to happen (if memory serves me 
correctly) in subjects with a mixture of Latin and Cyrillic characters. 
It's not my script and I'm not likely to be able to do a better job with 
PHP than the original author. However, I can try. It does not happen in 
English forum, or very rarely.


>>> And in some cases messages are actually available in forum but
>>> disappear after reply in forum.
>>
>> Sorry Maxim, but this is impossible. A post can only "disappear" if
>> it is specifically deleted by myself. Sometimes *new* posts and
>
> [...]
>
> Here it is:
>
> http://forum.nginx.org/read.php?21,64648
> http://nginx.org/pipermail/nginx-ru/2010-March/thread.html#33016
>
> The following message was there (and was replied by Sergey in the
> same forum thread), but disappeared after reply:
>
> http://nginx.org/pipermail/nginx-ru/2010-March/033042.html
>
> Here is Sergey's reply:
>
> http://forum.nginx.org/read.php?21,64648,64889#msg-64889
>
> And here is his question ("Strange, your previous post
> disappeared"):
>
> http://forum.nginx.org/read.php?21,64648,64890#msg-64890


I stand corrected. The other way it can happen is if I restore a 
database backup. I did  on March 17th as I had a problem with a Phorum 
upgrade and had to restore a backup. Looking through my email records 
that occurred on March 17th. (Looking also at Google, Phorum version 
5.2.15 was released that day. I upgraded - there is a thread on my 
issues in their support forum which is currently unreachable.) So it's 
likely that in the 30-60 minutes that I was working on this a few 
messages were indeed lost. The backup that was restored was no older 
than that, and was probably closer to 15 minutes old. It's an 
overstatement to say that "in some cases messages are actually available 
in forum but disappear after reply in forum." This type of thing happens 
and is why I follow the good practice to create a backup of the database 
and of all files immediately prior to any upgrade. I made an error in 
judgement in not stopping the cron job that imports email into the 
database every two minutes. Once those emails are imported they are 
deleted from the "Maildir" and cannot be recovered. So once I reverted 
to the "good" database those entries were gone.

Do you have other examples from other time periods? If so then there are 
several possibilities including that someone might have gotten my 
password. I have changed it just now.


>
> Maxim Dounin
>
> p.s.  And, BTW, another problem which may be seen in the same
> thread and very annoying: forum-to-maillist gateway skips things
> like "[alert]" while they are happily rendered in the forum itself.
> In extreme cases it munges regexps posted via forum to something
> different but still valid.
>
> Most likely it tries to skip bbcodes, but looks like it does it
> wrong and this causes more harm than good.  Could you please
> either fix it or just switch off this bbcode removal?

I don't know how "happily" it renders anything. However, the bbcode 
stripping in outgoing email is woefully inadequate and will strip 
anything enclosed in square brackets. I have disabled this as of now but 
it will likely have some undesirable effects.


-- 
Jim Ohlstein