I am about ready to merge the forum-v2 branch into trunk. If there are any objections, voice them quickly.

The forum-v2 branch implements a "forum" capability. Here is a quick summary:

• Messages are organized into threads. The initial post of a thread contains a title. All subsequent posts omit the title, but have an in-reply-to field.

• Passers-by can post anonymously, or (depending on the configuration) they can create a new account on-the-spot and post using their new account. The "self-register" feature has been in Fossil for ages out of mind. I forget who contributed it. (It did not come from me.) Self-registration has been seldom used before now, as far as I know.

• Messages can be edited, either by the user who originally posted the message, or by an administrator.

• Each message is an artifact, using a new artifact class called "Forum". See https://www.fossil-scm.org/fossil/doc/forum-v2/www/fileformat.wiki#forum for a description. There are three new cards: G, H, and I.

• Because each message is an artifact, forum content syncs just like everything else.

• Forum message from untrusted users (ex: anonymous) can be held for moderation. Such messages are not synced nor may they be replied too, until they are approved by a moderator.

• Email notification is available for new forum posts. Currently, the alert emails contain a very brief synopsis of the post - essentially just the title. This can be enhanced later to provide the complete text of the post, if that is seen as desirable.

• Each forum message has a mimetype. Currently supported mimetypes are text/plain, text/markdown, and text/x-fossil-wiki. New mimetypes can be added later

The intent is to replace this mailing list, as well as various other mailing lists (fossil-users, sqlite-users, sqlite-dev, sqlite-announce) with the new forum feature. I hope to shut down the mailing lists and bring the forums all live within about a week. So if you have concerns, voice them soon.

Great work, DRH! This seems like such a useful feature. Yet another reason Fossil is better than all the alternatives out there.

Thanks for testing out the auto-registration and reply mechanism :-)

Any time. Thanks for working so hard on pushing this feature out.

There appear to be some long delays - up to 60 seconds - when submitting a post. I do not yet know what is causing this. I am working the problem. In the meantime, please continue to exercise the system and be patient if submitting a reply, or starting a new thread, takes a little longer than seems reasonable.

I also experienced a long delay after clicking "Preview" and not "Submit". I'm assuming these issues are related but I figured I'd let you know.

I have temporary hacked around the problem, so things should be working better for the moment. However, I do not yet understand the root cause of the problem, so you might see the problem reemerge again (temporarily) as I make further changes trying to chase it to ground. Thank you for your patience. Do not hesitate to alert me if the problem reappears, or if you find other issues in the new code.

I like this idea a lot.

There is a search feature. But there is currently no other way to "sort threads". I'm not exactly sure what that would look like, nor am I clear on what the advantages would be. Can you elaborate?

Spams and trolls can be deleted. You just don't see those buttons because you are not logged in as a user who has the authority to do that kind of thing. :-)

The artifact design includes the thread-id in the artifact. So an artifact is tied to a particular thread when it is created. It would, in theory, be possible to change that using a tag, but it would be hard. So, there is not currently a way to merge or split threads. When does the need for that sort of thing arise?

I noticed that the forum search only searches message content. Can we also make it search usernames? If I search "danbarbarito" I would expect all my posts to come up, but currently it shows no results.

Please double-check. I thought I had rigged it so that it also searched for the title and the username. But it was late last night when I wrote that code, so there could easily be a bug. If possible, provide a test case to help me track it down.

There are actually two search mechanisms in Fossil. There is grep-like search that actually scans the entire corpus on each search request. Then there is a second system that uses SQLite's FTS4 mechanism. Maybe the search-for-username only works on the simpler grep-like search. This repository is used FTS4.

Searching by username still does not work for me

I have (temporarily) turned off the FTS4 search and so searching has reverted to the less efficient full-corpus scan technique. And with that configuration change, search for usernames appears to be working. Please confirm. I will strive to get FTS4 search working again soon.

Its working for me now! Thanks a lot.

Is there, or will there be soon, a full documentation of how to configure this new capability in a repository?

> When I registered for an account, I wasn't prompted to confirm my email address

See https://fossil-scm.org/forumtest1/forumpost/34019bf5b8876e684def512

yes, I agree! DRH is very clever, generous, and genuine with wanting to make great software.

The Delete button is suppose to work like an Edit that sets the body of the message to an empty string.

Remember - this is block chain. You cannot remove old records, you can only insert new records that modify the old records. The Delete button works by inserting a new artifact that overrides the text of an older artifact so that the text is now an empty string.

No, it was because his post was pending moderation. You cannot reply to an unmoderated post. You should be able to reply now, though.

Would you please consider also emulating the 'digest' feature of the mailing list? It shouldn't be hard, since the emailing functionality is already there. Or maybe I am missing something...

I believe this functionality is already here. Visit the /alerts page and then select "Daily digest only".

Wow! :)

I think the post list should show author id in addition to time like other forums.

I was initially going to reply to Roy as well, but it wouldn't have been succinct as this. Thanks for making these points.

So far the forum has turned out better than I thought it would have, and we know folks will provide patches and suggestions on improvements.

Now that the forum is created, I was thinking of things like this:

1. Code reviews of projects can also be apart of the repo. I think the initial idea for all of this started when folks were stating github allows easier pull requests. Now that the forum is working, it might mean pull requests can happen in a github style.

2. If a bug is raised on a forum post, it would be cool if that could be converted into a bug report on the project's repo with a single button. There might be some clean up in the bug to do, but it could easily cross link bug to forum post, and forum post to bug.

When replying to a post, either the top thread post or a subpost, it would be nice to see the username you're replying to.

Looks awesome. I recompiled a week or two ago after updating to the forum branch, but didn't see (didn't have too much time to actually look for) where to set it up.

Documentation is on my to-do list. Let me get it working first....

An observation (not a criticism) is that (at its current state of development) the forum does not work too well on mobile devices. And so IMO it isn’t yet a replacement for the mailing list.

I have seen that too, and agree that it is something that needs fixing.

> Because each message is an artifact, forum content syncs just like everything else.

Does this mean, instead of subscribing to a mailing list, we do `fossil clone` the forum to perticipate in it, and do `fossil update` to get new posts?

Since you are participating the new forum now, without having cloned it, surely this was a facetious questions, right?