Introduction

This product provides code to support discussion groups, which are the most common type of group in GroupServer. The complex posting rules for a discussion group are implemented by this product. The discussion group code is enabled by changing the marker interface.

Posting Rules

The core User Can Post system¹ provides one rule: is the person blocked from posting. A discussion group provides six additional rules, with their associated viewlets.

Has a Profile:

Checks to see if the person posting has a profile. The other way to look at this is the person is not anonymous.

Member:

Checks to see if the person posting is a group member.

Working Email Address:

Checks to see if the person posting has a verified email address. This prevents spamming, because you know that whoever posts has a working address.

Posting Limit:

Each group has a maximum posting rate². This rule ensures that no-one exceeds the rate.

Required Site Properties:

This rules ensures everyone has completed sign-up.

Required Group Properties:

Each group can have some properties that are required for just the group³. This rule ensures that each member has the properties set.

Marker Interface

A group is turned into a discussion group by changing the marker interface for the group folder to IGSDiscussionGroup. This marker interface has the following inheritance tree:

gs.group.base.interfaces.IGSGroupMarker
    △
    │
gs.group.type.discussion.interfaces.IGSDiscussionGroup

Resources

• Code repository: https://source.iopen.net/groupserver/gs.group.type.discussion
• Questions and comments to http://groupserver.org/groups/development
• Report bugs at https://redmine.iopen.net/projects/groupserver

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1. See the gs.group.member.canpost product for more information: <https://source.iopen.net/groupserver/gs.group.member.canpost/>↩

2. See the gs.group.messages.ratelimit product for more information: <https://source.iopen.net/groupserver/gs.group.messages.ratelimit/>↩

3. There is no interface for the administrator to set the required group-properties. However, they can be set in the ZMI: add the property IDs to the required_properties attribute of the mailing list.↩