[Mailman-Developers] GSOC - Archives UI for mailman: Use cases

[Dushyant Bansal]

Hi all,

I am a gsoc participant and here is my project proposal
http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/proposal/review/google/gsoc2011/dushyant/2001

As a first step, I have gone through all the use cases of archives UI 
listed as part of Systers Archive Project 
<http://systers.org/systers-dev/doku.php/mailman_archives_ui_-_yian_shang> 
last 
year<http://systers.org/systers-dev/doku.php/mailman_archives_ui_-_yian_shang> 
and these are my views. Please give your feedback.

*High-Priority*
Users Viewing a Conversation
    1.Users want to be able to navigate all messages within a 
conversation in as few clicks as possible
    2.Users prefer spending less time browsing all messages in a 
conversation
    3.Suppose the conversation the user found is a question about 
solving a technical problem. Users would want to be able to easily find 
replies (answers) to the original message.

-> Very important use cases. Even if we don't have any notion of a 
'conversation', showing more than one message on a page will help users 
to quickly browse through all the messages in a thread.

Handling Top/Bottom Posting
/By default, the quoted text can either be all hidden or all displayed. 
It might also be good to only hide the quoted text when it is at the end 
of the message, as when it is in the middle, the user is likely to want 
to see it for context.
/
->On mailing lists, people generally use 'inline posting' to reply. One 
level of inline posting is helpful to see the context, but if it goes 
beyond one level then, it might be a good idea to hide the old quoted text.

Users Viewing Index of Conversations
Single Archive and Page-Splitting for Conversations Index - 2010-07-09, 
2010-07-16
->This is a good idea to view archives as a conversation.

*Low-Priority:*
Users Viewing a Conversation
    4.Users want to be able to easily separate the meta data (sender's 
name, date the message was sent etc) from the post so they can either 
skip over or really pay attention to whichever part they need.

    5.Some users may want to be able to distinguish between replying to 
the sender and replying to the mailing list

Situations that involve filtering messages by date:
-> Though, it is very easy to implement.

Support for Non-dlist lists:
-> I don't have much idea how many users use this.

*One more Use case*
When a user views a message, he is provided the link to either go to 
previous message or next message. Along with those links, we can show a 
list of links to all messages of that thread along with author names, to 
allow that user to directly jump to any message in that thread.
"Mail-archive" provides this feature.

Looking forward to your comments.

Regards,
Dushyant