On Thu, May 9, 2013 at 9:19 AM, Guillaume Paumier gpaumier@wikimedia.org wrote:
What I currently have in mind is a bot subscribed to the wikitech-ambassadors list, that would post every first message of a thread to the talk page of people who have signed up (like https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Global_message_delivery/Targets/Tech_ambassa... ) or to a noticeboard (that would then be mostly automated).
The bot would create a new section, using the email's subject line as the section title, and its body as the message. It would ideally link back to the gmane archive for that thread, so that users can read follow-up messages there. Messages could be trimmed if they're too long. The system could possibly also be used for other mailing lists later.
My intuition is that this wouldn't be exceptionally hard to implement, but I'd like a more informed opinion.
The hard parts of such a system involve making sure the email really came from the mailing list (rather than someone spoofing a message to the bot's email), detecting the first message of a thread (witness how gmail starts a new "thread" whenever the subject line changes, or conversely how other systems don't deal well with people who start a new thread by replying to a random message in an old thread), and possibly converting HTML email to wikitext. None of which is prohibitively difficult to get to a good-enough state. Then the bot actually making the post to the wiki page is trivial.