From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Ben Schmidt Date: Tue, 26 Jan 2010 12:47:42 +0000 Subject: Implementing real names Message-Id: <4B5EE46E.3080504@yahoo.com.au> List-Id: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: mlmmj@mlmmj.org Hi, I'd like to test the water regarding this one. A feature that I would find useful is having a membership list that includes real names. Likewise, it would be helpful having real names included in subscription and unsubscription notification emails (and subscription moderation emails) and possibly post moderation emails, too. This should initially come from the From: header of mail sent to +subscribe addresses, but should be able to be changed by the list owner as desired, also. Particularly given our conservative maintainer :-) and that this could be a fair amount of work, and have some implementation subtleties, I think this is worth a bit of discussion before I dive in and try anything. So, I'm wondering what people think of this, and how it might be implemented. The information could be stored in subscribers.d, etc. files, but I think this is probably a bad idea, as all the code that uses those files would need to be changed to parse them. Perhaps it would make sense to have a realnames.d? Files under that directory could contain email address and realname separated on a line by a tab. Searches similar to the search that's done for a subscriber-only list could then be done to look up the real name for any subscriber. The membership list could be constructed by carefully traversing both subscribers.d and realnames.d in step. Lookups of real names and the membership list could become a bit more expensive, but posting messages would be unaffected, and not so much code would need changing (and testing, etc.). Another possibility would be to keep the data in some kind of simple database file that facilitated quick lookup and update. This seems a bit out-of-style with how mlmmj works, though. Thoughs? Ben.