doc/todo/comment_by_mail.mdwn



I would like to allow comments on ikiwiki pages without CGI.
I have in mind something like


Use a pagetemplate hook

in a plugin (DONE)


add a mailto: url to each page matching some pagespec
(currently every page gets a comment footer)


this mailto url goes to an address identifying the page  (something like
user-iki-blog~I_hate_markdown@host.fqdn.tld).  (DONE)
more details


on the mail receiving end, these messages are either deleted, or ran through
a filter to be turned into blog posts.  As a first step, I have
written
a filter that decodes the address and writes the message into an appropriate
mailbox. I would be interested in any ideas people have about security.


the same plugin can check for comments on a particular page next time the wiki
is generated, and add a link. (more or less done)

If the filter just checks in the posts into revision control, the
post-commit hook would handle updating the wiki to include those
posts as they come in. --[[Joey]]


work in progress can be


cloned, or
browsed

Any comments? Write them here or send them to [[DavidBremner]]

I don't want to derail this with too much blue-skying, but I was thinking
earlier that it would be nice if ikiwiki could do something sensible with
mailbox files, such as turning them into a (threaded?) blog display.
One reason I was thinking about that was just that it would be nice to
be able to use ikiwiki for mailing list archives. But another reason was
that it would be nice to solve the problem described in
[[discussion_page_as_blog]]. For that you really want a threaded system,
and mailbox file formats already have threading.
If that were done, it would tie into what you're working on in an
interesting way, since the incoming mail would only need to be committed to
the appropriate mailbox file, with ikiwiki then running to process it.
--[[Joey]]

It is an interesting idea.  I like that it uses an arbitrary MUA
as a "moderation" interface.  After I killed a debian BTS entry with
clumsy pseudoheader editing I think any
reference info should also be encoded into the address.


The current version of this plugin is now running on my home page. See for example
a recent post in my blog.

Unfortunately although the [[mailbox|todo/mbox]] renderer supports threading, I haven't had
a chance to implement comments on comments yet. [[DavidBremner]]