Suggestion: Mails to multiple players (to/cc/bcc), add contacts book, named mailing lists

[PeterNerlich]

I have not yet tried the mod, but read a big part of its source code. I am just running my thoughts here, maybe this is not needed at all - in which case you should probably wait until I loose interest or do a pull request myself

As I currently understand it, each player can specify the recipient via just a plain text field. I think it would be nice to be able to choose players (and not just one) from a list, especially if the name is complicated and you often write back and forth without continuing old threads. This could be implemented by splitting the form input by every occourence of , (comma), and removing leftover spaces and then sending the mail to all of the mentioned. The next step could be adding CC and BCC fields (everyone in all fields gets send the mail, but only TO and CC fields get sent with the mail).
Then, it would make sense to add a contacts book that automatically adds players you write to and maybe has a "frequent contacts" section for convenience.
Here mailing lists would be nice. I am not sure what the official meaning of that is, I have seen two types: merely names, shorthands, for a collection of contacts and a mechanism on the server that people can subscribe to, to get every mail sent to the lists address. I speak of the former, but I want to have the latter, too - as a separate mod using the api. How to distinguish lists from player names? By prepending @, but I would like to distinguish between lists a player made in his contacts and playerless lists (registered by mods etc.) and am unsure how to best do this.

Anyway, summary of thoughts:

• composition: multiple players in TO
• composition: add CC and BCC fields
• contacts: add/remove players
• contacts: compose message to selected player(s)
• composition: select players from contacts
• contacts: "frequent contacts" (BONUS SUGGESTION)
• mailing lists: storage+api for playerless mailing lists (alias for collection of players)
• composition: accept mailing lists
• contacts: create/edit/delete personal mailing lists
• contacts: setting for mailing list to be publicly accessible or private (list can be written to by other players/"There is no publicly accessible mailing list with that name" error)
• (mailing list mod: subscribe/unsubscribe from list, forward messages to all members after moderation etc.)

[BuckarooBanzay]

👍 that was all planned in the beginning (including sending "packages/items" as attachments)
But i somehow got distracted by other ideas 😄

I'll implement some of those things for sure when i have some time and motivation again, in the mean-time: feel free to submit PR's if you aren't bored with minetest already 🤣

[PeterNerlich]

Yeah, I got to take a look at this because I wondered about a better server-news (which I also didn't actually try yet). Thought about only showing to players when there are updates, per-player settings, separating updates so it's not one big document etc. until the idea got indistingushably close to mailing lists. 😄

[PeterNerlich]

FYI: I started to play around on https://gitlab.fachschaften.org/peternerlich/mail_mod/-/tree/cc-bcc. That code is not tested yet, maybe it barfs immediately.

[BuckarooBanzay]

FYI: I started to play around on https://gitlab.fachschaften.org/peternerlich/mail_mod/-/tree/cc-bcc. That code is not tested yet, maybe it barfs immediately.

Nice! Ping me up when it is more or less stable, i'm willing to test and merge that 👍

[PeterNerlich]

Having finished implementing frequent contacts, I wondered about how to best set up mailing lists. I think they should be usable just like the usernames in to/cc/bcc, so I put this into api.lua in my fork:

Usernames in Minetest can only be alphanumerical and contain hyphens and underscores. On this basis, we define a naming schema for mailinglists that are immediately distinguishable from playernames as follows: Server global mailing lists consist of an at sign and a list name (e.g. @maintenance), user created mailing lists additionally have a colon and the username they belong to (e.g. @cave-exploration:test by the user test).

I split this off on second thought, this is something for the later mailing list mod:

Mailing lists may be actively or passively moderated, meaning that their owners (or in case of global lists users with the mailinglist-mod privelege) can blacklist or whitelist a set of users from writing to a mailinglist (passive moderation) or manually greenlight messages from a backlog to be distributed to the subscribed users (active moderation). In case of rejection the sender may or may not be notified by another message.

And nope, after revisiting the checkpoints above I like my previous idea of only having global mailinglists be programmable in more detail better after all.

I would appreciate your input on this format or anything else regarding the paragraph. Do you think this would be a good and intuitive format? Do you maybe have an idea that might work even better?

[BuckarooBanzay]

I would appreciate your input on this format or anything else regarding the paragraph. Do you think this would be a good and intuitive format?

The 2nd paragraph sounds better IMO

Do you maybe have an idea that might work even better?

I'm unsure if the privilege is really needed, if someone really wants to spam he could easily use the chat for that, using mailing lists is more clicking and setting things up so it might not be an inutitive tool for mass-spamming.

Your ideas are pretty cool, i'm having trouble keeping the web-client up-to date with the current mod functionality 😉