Der Blog

A member of the role-playing society (who shall not be named, though some people reading will know who I am talking about) recently tried to set up a SUCS account for the role-playing society for the purposes of making a forum. I have expressed my opinions of forums before on this blog, and will be referring to them here. I would be interested in setting up a forum for the RP soc, except for my reservations about web forums.

Essentially, my major complaint about web forums is their interface. phpBB will email you to tell you of new posts, but these emails do not contain the post's content, and I assume they don't contain appropriate headers to let your email client thread them properly. More critically, however, it's not possible to post by email. Essentially, to interact with the forum I have to use a web browser, and web browsers are not well suited to content that updates irregularly. I want to do everything - read and post - within my email client. (A cynic would say that what I want is a mailing list. And they'd be right, except that I want people who want a forum to have one of those too.)

So I went googling for forum "mailing list" hoping to find a package that works as both. What I came across was WordPress.

WordPress (as many of my readers will know) is a sophisticated multiuser blogging system. It has multiple users and multiple levels of users, so you can let different users do different things. It lets you give a post a number of categories, or tags, which let you navigate old posts by topic. It seems WordPress has an option to make the front page of a blog present posts by topic instead of chronologically. So it would probably look very like a forum, as long as you categorise posts appropriately. You can even set up an email address that it checks periodically; any mail you send to this address will appear as a blog entry.

There are still a few essential features missing for it, but I think it would be possible to adapt it for use as a forum. In such a system "posting an entry" is isomorphic to "starting a new topic", and "posting a comment" is isomorphic to "replying to a topic/thread". With an email metaphor the only difference should be that in one case you post using "new email" and in the other using "reply".

For example, you would have tags for each game: "mage" for Mage, "vamp" or "requiem" for Vampire, "ce" for Cursed Empire, "iron" for Iron Kingdoms, etc. You have a tag for general discussions about the society, say "soc" or "rp". You have one for announcements, say "announce". You also have a "sticky" tag. You would be able to edit your WordPress templates so that the archive for each game tag arranges posts chronologically, but puts announcements and stickies first. The web interface, technically built on a date-sorted archive of posts which have no particularly firm connection other than what tags they have, need look no different to the traditional web forum.

There's a parallel here with Gmail, which assigns labels to emails, versus traditional email systems, which file them into folders. The system with tags has exactly the same functionality, but is far more flexible, because you can mix and match things as you want and customise what your client does with messages based on what combinations of tags they have.

Some of the features you would need are:

• The ability to read the blog, and comments, by email. This includes comment emails having the usual Message-ID: and In-Reply-To: headers that let your email client thread them.
• The ability to submit comments by email, ideally just by replying to the emails that represent posts and comments. You could probably use plus addressing for this purpose; e.g., to post a reply to http://sucs.org/blogs/pwb/entry/hello-world, you might send email to pwb+hello-world@blogs.sucs.org, and the received comment emails would have this address in the Reply-To: header.
• Some sort of auth system on these email addresses. Currently any email sent to the blog-by-email address, by anyone, becomes a post. A public key system might be a good approach, though just email addresses with appropriate forgery detection should be robust enough for some people's purposes.
• The ability to post comments that only a given level of user can read (for the RP soc, this would be posts that only the STs (GMs) can read, such as discussions of future plots). Currently you can lock away posts in WordPress, but you need to use a password, which is a rather awkward method. Anyone who manages teams of sysadmins will know this - giving out the root password means you have to change the password and distribute it, and have people accept and remember it, whenever someone's admin privileges are revoked. For a forum this also means you have to create a new password for each locked post, or agree on the same password for all such posts, which is even more awkward. Also bear in mind that people forget passwords sometimes. Better to base it on user level or groups.