Stan, I had about 6 Yahoo Groups before I met Drupal. I moved all of them to the Drupal based forums on my site. A few users wanted a mailing list so I gave them that functionality with Mailman. Oddly enough most of the users who were complaining that they needed a mailing list now prefer the Drupal forums and the users that went to the mailing list are wondering where everyone went! However, there are some of my people that cannot (due to disabilities) navigate the forums well. Most use Speech Recognition and still have problems. So I'm working with these modules in Drupal to make a bi-directional communication between a forum and a Mailman mailing list: 1) Listhandler 2) Mail Alias 3) Mailhandler I'm still testing but it's working so far using those 3 modules on my sandbox system. It seems that it should work with any mailing list software to and from a Drupal forum though. The problem I have with PhpBB is even though it is good software and very popular, it's too popular with the "let's spread mayhem" crowd. I just spent the last weekend helping clear a set of trojan's from a PHPBB's Forum index page. I guess I'm just too serious about my site for those games. I'm unaware of any tie-in software between PhpBB and Drupal however. There is another problem I've found with mailing list servers. The majority of them require root access to install or get them to work after the install. If you're using a shared server it's not possible for you to put most of them on your system. You may have to get the host company to do it if they will and you might still have problems. One other factor I had in mind was that I wanted all relevant material in one place and searchable as many people use my lists/site as reference material. Hope that's of help. Skip On 8/10/05, Stan stangrad-drupal@stanfordalumni.org wrote:
I have a couple of phpbb forums, and would like people to have the ability to post to these forums via e-mail and receive forum messages via e-mail if they so choose. In other words, I'm looking for "Yahoo Groups"-like functionality.
Can Drupal do this?
I'm considering installing mailman and mail2forum which, combined with the phpbb I already have installed, is supposed to do this.
I've also looked into mailgust, which might work, but isn't open source.
Is there a good/popular solution here? Suggestions? Opinions?
Is there another open-source product that does this? (combining separate apps to perform a larger task is very Unix-y, but phpbb and mailman are both fairly complex, so a single app that does both might be more useful).
I'm not married to phpbb-- my forums are small + I could easily transfer them to drupal or another app. For example, I've heard phorum has mailing list support built-in, though it doesn't quite seem to do what I want.
I've seen at least a couple of discussion threads that say "It's hard to believe, but no such open-source product exists", but I don't believe them :)
On Sat, 13 Aug 2005, Skip Taylor wrote:
problems. So I'm working with these modules in Drupal to make a bi-directional communication between a forum and a Mailman mailing list:
- Listhandler
- Mail Alias
- Mailhandler
I'm still testing but it's working so far using those 3 modules on my sandbox system. It seems that it should work with any mailing list software to and from a Drupal forum though.
That is the intention. I it doesn't work, please file bug reports. Mailalias might be too outdated and would need updating, I guess.
The problem I have with PhpBB is even though it is good software and very popular,
Have you looked at the code? It is more popular than good.
it's too popular with the "let's spread mayhem" crowd. I just spent the last weekend helping clear a set of trojan's from a PHPBB's Forum index page. I guess I'm just too serious about my site for those games. I'm unaware of any tie-in software between PhpBB and Drupal however.
There isn't any. People have cried for some time now, the crying mostly stopped.
There is another problem I've found with mailing list servers. The majority of them require root access to install or get them to work after the install. If you're using a shared server it's not possible for you to put most of them on your system. You may have to get the host company to do it if they will and you might still have problems.
If your traffic is low any you have procmail installed you can look at installing smartlist.
Cheers, Gerhard
On 8/13/05, Gerhard Killesreiter killesreiter@physik.uni-freiburg.de wrote:
On Sat, 13 Aug 2005, Skip Taylor wrote:
problems. So I'm working with these modules in Drupal to make a bi-directional communication between a forum and a Mailman mailing list:
- Listhandler
- Mail Alias
- Mailhandler
I'm still testing but it's working so far using those 3 modules on my sandbox system. It seems that it should work with any mailing list software to and from a Drupal forum though.
That is the intention. I it doesn't work, please file bug reports. Mailalias might be too outdated and would need updating, I guess.
I'll let you know. I haven't used Mailalias yet but I'll try to do that today if I can and report in good or bad.
The problem I have with PhpBB is even though it is good software and very popular,
Have you looked at the code? It is more popular than good.
Never looked at the code. I have looked at Drupal's code and find it easy to read and can even figure out what parts of it are doing, even though I'm not a PHP programmer nor have I had time to read the docs on it's internals.
There is another problem I've found with mailing list servers. The majority of them require root access to install or get them to work after the install. If you're using a shared server it's not possible for you to put most of them on your system. You may have to get the host company to do it if they will and you might still have problems.
If your traffic is low any you have procmail installed you can look at installing smartlist.
I gathered that smartlist is a 'one way' only solution - outbound. Did I misread that? Can there be more than one smartlist on a system?
Regards,
Skip
On Aug 14, 2005, at 05:02, Skip Taylor wrote:
I gathered that smartlist is a 'one way' only solution - outbound. Did I misread that? Can there be more than one smartlist on a system?
SmartList is a general purpose mailing list manager which is designed to be administered by email.
Yes, each mailing list has a unique mailing address (and -request address for administrative tasks). If you can control a number of mail addresses as your non-root user, then you could set up multiple lists. There are several pages of tips for setting up SmartList (and the underlying procmail) referenced here: http://www.procmail.org/
On 8/13/05, Jim Tittsler jwt@onjapan.net wrote:
On Aug 14, 2005, at 05:02, Skip Taylor wrote:
I gathered that smartlist is a 'one way' only solution - outbound. Did I misread that? Can there be more than one smartlist on a system?
SmartList is a general purpose mailing list manager which is designed to be administered by email.
Yes, each mailing list has a unique mailing address (and -request address for administrative tasks). If you can control a number of mail addresses as your non-root user, then you could set up multiple lists. There are several pages of tips for setting up SmartList (and the underlying procmail) referenced here: http://www.procmail.org/
-- Jim Tittsler http://www.OnJapan.net/ GPG: 0x01159DB6 Python Starship http://Starship.Python.net/crew/jwt/ Mailman IRC irc://irc.freenode.net/#mailman
Please excuse me. I had smartlist and the simplenews module confused. Don't know how I managed that, but I did!
Regards,
Skip
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Gerhard Killesreiter -
Jim Tittsler -
Skip Taylor