On Mon, 2004-23-08 at 12:34 +0100, Kate wrote:
On Mon, 2004-08-23 at 03:38, Jeff Warnica wrote:
On Sat, 2004-21-08 at 09:35 +0100, Kate wrote:
The easiest way to do this would be via a mailing
list which users
subscribe to
Why would you want to use a full blown MLM system?
Because it's designed to do exactly this, and it's already there with
little effort required. What is the problem with using a mailing list?
I think that you have come up with a solution before you have correctly
identified the problem. The question is not: What is the best mailing
list system to use for feature-of-the-day? but: What is the best way to
distribute feature-of-the-day by email? It may be that doing so with an
(existing) MLM is the best way, but a full blown MLM is not the only way
to distribute large volumes of mail.
It
could be done with a very long alias :)
Yes, it could. I had considered that, but automatic subscription and
management is likely to be a lot easier than doing it by hand.
Well, that depends on the MTA. I suspect that at least one MTA has the
ability to use arbitrary SQL statements as the source for the "right
hand side" of an alias. My MTA of choice's router is programmable by a
sh clone; a one or two line wrapper around echo/mysql would do it. Moot
point, an alias wouldn't be a good idea, I don't know how one would
restrict random people from sending mail to it without the alias being a
pipe to a program, in which case, just go with the program alone.
Users have exactly one option:
get the mail, or not. Make it a mediawiki preference.
Are you offering to write the code?
I am, and I have. Adding a toggle pref was surprisingly easy. Since it
is only about 5 new lines its not even worth while posting the diff.
On the other hand: It disturbs me that the prefs are in a BLOB (rather
then say, a prefs table). This itself may be reason not to make this a
preference, as the following would likely take a very long time:
select user.user_email from user where user.user_options like "%
featuredbymail=1%";
I don't know how, or if, MySQL could optimize that. I believe it would
have to do a comparison on every record in the user table.
Is there some regular daily processing that inspects every user record
already?