Capturing mail (was Re: Stackoverflow)

Sent from my mobile device (so please excuse typos)

On 13 May 2011, at 02:31, David Blevins <david.blevins@...> wrote:

> For me tagging and voting and (i forgot) the marking the question answered (thanks, Benson) are the parts I
would love.
> 
> I write some really good responses sometimes and even *I* have a hard time finding some of my old responses
in the list archive haystack.

Right. I always ask users to provide a patch if they find an answer in the mailing list useful. Of course it
rarely happens (even with devs). 

Keeping things simple, could we provide a feature in the CMS that simply copies a mail from our archives
(with backlinks) into the CMS system for the appropriate project?

A link to this could also be provided in the footer of each mail (only works for committers).

In the CMS we could have some magic system to build an index. 

I appreciate this has now moved away from stack overflow (I changed the subject) but for any Perl hackers
looking for something useful to do on a weekend I would certainly use such a feature. 

This could grow to fancy tagging, tracking and more. But I believe thus is a reasonably simple thin to do that
would provide immediate benefits. 

Ross

> 
> And to avoid the "tag names can be spam" issue having so that only committers can introduce new tags would be
fine for me.  It could be a file in svn or something else equally lame but functional.
> 
> 
> -David
> 
> On May 12, 2011, at 6:04 PM, Ted Dunning wrote:
> 
>> There is another factor that comes into play.  QA sites like SO also blend
>> in wiki and trust mechanisms.  Thus, highly rated users can and do rewrite
>> questions to be more answerable/understandable.  They can also rewrite
>> answers if necessary.
>> 
>> Without automated karma, the moderation function has to be granted manually
>> which is a process that doesn't scale as easily and is subject to attack by
>> cabals.  That way lies wikipedia's dictatorship of the editor proletariat
>> and associated drop in user participation.  That is fine for a largely
>> static knowledge base, but SO addresses much more dynamic topics in a way
>> that engages the readership much more strongly.  Moreover, the feedback
>> cycle essentially guarantees that the moderators reflect the interests of
>> the voting public.
>> 
>> On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 5:47 PM, David Blevins <david.blevins@...>wrote:
>> 
>>> Another thought.  Sometimes I wonder how hard it would be to just allow
>>> tagging and voting on top of a plain mailing list emails.  A simple DB with
>>> the messageId as the key for tags and vote count then a slightly fancier
>>> archive view than we have now.   And hey, markdown happens to look nice as
>>> plain email.  I've actually been indenting code snippets for years.
>>> 
>>> I admit I like getting SO points and badges but they do not factor in at
>>> all when looking for the right answer.
>>> 
>