plan to revise the /bboard system

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OpenACS 3.x

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revision plan for the /bboard system

part of the ArsDigita Community System by Philip Greenspun

We want to rewrite the /bboard system so that

we switch from a varchar primary key to an integer (part of a general ACS-wide move to simple integer primary keys); retaining the old sort_key system, though, and also preserving the legacy keys in a separate column so that people can still point to threads
let's increase the number of chars used at any one level to 4 (from 2). This will address the needs of sites like cnn.com where they don't use threading and have a gazillion responses to the same top-level question
we have soft-delete by the moderators (thread disappears from the moderated version but is still in the database) and a mode where new questions require approval before they go live in the moderated version ("don't show this to anyone until at least one moderator has said it was okay")
we use the abstract URL system
(to support the edu module and MIT Sloan School) scoping of bboards by roles within a group (so that a bboard can be for professors and TAs in a class but not students)
(related to above) make sure that the bboard system works with the group scoping stuff (subcommunities)
some additional abstraction in the database at the PL/SQL level, e.g., a function that answers the question "Can User 17 read Bboard Topic #32?"
a more sensible approach to this "featured", unmoderated, etc. stuff (template it!) on the home page (and don't show people bboards in which they are prohibited from reading))
an actually useful threaded interface for bboards with 100,000 postings
maybe some abstraction out of the USgeospatial stuff (we should be able to tie discussions to arbitrary other objects in the database, using on_which_table, on_what_id style of pointing)

Email Fixes

take out the control-Ms
From header should say "Joe Smith via photo.net bboard <joes@foobar.com>"
the email notifications should have a link not just to the overall bboard but to the individual thread
correctly set References: and In-Reply-To: headers so that a mail reader can display these as threads
(hard and make it configurable) inbound email gets posted to the bboard in the right place

Bug Fixes

the Q&A admin pages should not warn you that a user has turned off notification when in fact there is a thread alert

philg@mit.edu