[Mailman-Developers] [GSOC 2013] Introduction and Ideas

[Terri Oda]

On 13-04-07 3:47 AM, Karthikeya Viswanath wrote:
> I also have a couple of ideas of my own, and I'd like to see how feasible
> they are.
> 1. Tags:  Could we have tags for mails so we could get an idea for what the
> mail is about at a glance? This could also help in the metrics and also in
> spam reduction . ( As in undesired mails )
> 2. Better filters for archive download:  Give users the option to download
> specific threads of an archive , or all contributions by a specific user or
> all threads with a keyword. Last time I had to do it, I had to iterate over
> the entire list and save the pages manually.

Getting people to use tags would be challenging for a lot of mailing 
lists, given how hard it is to get them to use topics correctly (or even 
dlists, although I've seen a lot more success with those). You'd 
probably have to work on tagging automatically as well if you wanted it 
to ever be useful.  It might be cool, but to be completely honest, we're 
looking for more sure-thing desired projects this summer so that that we 
can showcase them in our next release, so you might have a bit of an 
uphill battle convincing us that this particular feature would fit the bill.

Filters for archive download might be more interesting, although again, 
I'm unsure how many people would use it.  Still, I can see that lots of 
people would potentially use filters for views on archives.  Have you 
taken a look at what HyperKitty is doing now to see how your idea might 
fit in with what's already there?

Both of these might actually be interesting in conjunction with the work 
that's already happening on dlists, so you might want to read up on that 
(check the Mailman or Systers wikis or just go through the archives of 
the list) and see if it spawns any new project ideas.

  Terri