[Discuss] the tested message system

[Jamie Cheyfetz]

On 11/17/06, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Could something less complicated and buggy, but with the option of
> > customized message groups, be made?
>
> A reply to all link would do away with much of the need for customised
> groups - only the first person to message that group would need to
> pick out the names from the long list, everyone else would just click
> the link.

This would require back-end storing of thread information, but perhaps
a way of dealing with Tom's beef of "reply to all" making too much
spam would be to give each new message a thread id.  Then, everyone
that reads the message would have a "stop listening to this thread"
link.  The best of both worlds -- easy on-the-fly groups and the
ability to opt out of spammy threads.

Of course, the drawback to this is that to make it work, everyone has
to use the appropriate reply buttons.  In addition, with subject
drift, people could be missing messages they might want.

Anyway, just an idea.


Of course, I still think the best solution is to expose the messages
in newsgroups.  Then people can have their favourite newsgroup reader,
along with threading, searching and per-message deletion, reply to all
(along with easy skipping of whole threads for those that don't want
to read them) and all that other good stuff that newsgroups provide.
The only potential flaw I see in this is the ability to limit the
readers of a post to just the in-game recipients.  I don't know enough
about the back-end newsgroup servers to know if this is easy, hard or
impossible.