Forum OpenACS Development: Notifications in various packages like news

For some applications, the importance of maintaining the uniqueness of where the notification came from is not that critical.

For instance, enabling the news package with notifications won't mean that users should be able to respond to a news post via their email client. In that case would be really nice to be able to send news items from "OpenACS News (mailto:info@openacs.org)".

I'm assuming the appropriate way to enable news with this functioanality is through notifications as I get batched notificatios with a pretty name. So I guess I'm just asking how can this be done and if it's easy, can we make it priority to get into 4.7?

talli

Collapse
Posted by Don Baccus on
A few of us have chatted about needing to take care of details of this sort for notifications, a fair amount of work needs to be done on this package for 4.7.  In particular we've talked about the need to allow e-mail responses to be turned on or off for notifications from particular packages.  Some people may want to turn them off for all packages rather than deal with Qmail, for instance.

Would you please take the meat of your post and submit a ticket in the bug tracker so we don't forget this particular point?  I think it's a good one.

Collapse
Posted by Lars Pind on
I'll open a ticket for setting the From address to the name/email of the person posting the item (or some other name/address which the application chooses), and let the Sender and Reply-To addresses be what it is today.

This allows my email client to display the right person as the from address, while showing me that it's actually sent by some mailing list server "on behalf of" that person.

/Lars

Collapse
Posted by Don Baccus on
Bart's already posted a patch for some of this ...
Collapse
Posted by Lars Pind on
Yeah, I realized after posting this. I've been a few days behind on the forums :)

/Lars

Collapse
Posted by Bart Teeuwisse on
The patch is with Roberto and Dave. It hasn't been committed to CVS yet as it also involves a change to aolserver/modules/tcl to make the name of the poster show up (rather than his/her e-mail address).

I've applied the patch to a site I'm working on and can attest that it works flawless. Hopefully, we'll see it applied to openacs.org soon.

Should I commit the changes to CVS or hold of till the patch has been verified by others?

/Bart

Collapse
Posted by Don Baccus on
Why not coordinate with Jeff Davis on it?  Your patch included  several things, including IIRC turning off e-mail responses to notifications altogether (which we want to make a parameter, as some will want to allow e-mail responses and other won't).

We could certainly apply the From:/Reply-to: portion of your patch but if you have time it might be nice to add an e-mail response configuration parameter that optionally triggers that portion of your patch(es).

Collapse
Posted by Bart Teeuwisse on
My patches contain an optional tcl script that qmail could use to return a more meaningfull response when e-mail responses to notifications are not implemented.

Respond to an OpenACS notification and you'll receive a qmail error message. With the optional tcl script in place you'd receive a message explaining that responses to the discussion go through the openacs.org web site.

So, the patches don't change the current design of the notifications. In order to switch the acceptance of e-mail responses with a parameter, AOLServer would have to handle the incoming responses in both cases.

/Bart

Collapse
Posted by Roberto Mello on
Don,

I made the changes to notifications to give it a parameter to turn on/off incoming mail checking alltogether. It went in before 4.6 final was cut.

-Roberto

Collapse
Posted by Don Baccus on
Seems like we misunderstood your change, then.  Fair enough.  More reason for you to coordinate with Jeff, if you don't mind , as long as you both understand I don't need to :)