Fossil

     required in order to properly support SMTP email in this complex
     world we've built.  As well, this design choice means you do not
     need to do duplicate configuration, such as to point Fossil at your
     server's TLS certificate private key in order to support users
     behind mail servers that require STARTTLS encryption.


<h2 id="setup">Setting up a Fossil Forum</h2>

<h3 id="caps">Capabilities</h3>

Fossil forums use the same role-based access control mechanism as
for normal Fossil repository logins.

There are several dedicated forum-related capability bits you can grant
a user:

    background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.05);
  }
</verbatim>

That overlays the background with 5% white to lighten it slightly.


<h3 id="search">Enable Forum Search</h3>

One of the underlying assumptions of the forum feature is that you will
want to be able to search the forum archives, so the <tt>/forum</tt>
page always includes a search box. Since that depends on search being
enabled on the Fossil repository, Fossil warns that search is disabled
until you go into Admin &rarr; Search and enable the "Search Forum"
setting.

You may want to enable some of the other Fossil search features while
you're in there. All of this does come at some CPU and I/O cost, which
is why it's disabled by default.


<h3 id="sso">Single Sign-On</h3>

If you choose to host your discussion forums within the same repository
as your project's other Fossil-managed content, you inherently have a
single sign-on system. Contrast third-party mailing list and forum
software where you either end up with two separate user tables and
permission sets, or you must go to significant effort to integrate the
two login systems.

project's Fossil-hosted forum. Fossil has a feature to solve this
problem which is probably less well known than it should be, and which
has been a feature of Fossil since April of 2011: Admin →
Login-Group. This allows one Fossil repository to recognize users
authorized on a different Fossil repository.


<h3 id="alerts">Email Notifications (Alerts)</h3>

The detailed information for this feature of Fossil is in two other
documents:

  *  [./alerts.md | Email Alerts]
  *  [./emaildesign.md | Email Notification Design]

You may want to study those in detail, since email is complicated. Some
of that complexity necessarily leaks out to the configuration of email
notification in Fossil.


<h4 id="quick">Quick Setup</h4>

However, if you've already got a working Postfix, Exim, or Sendmail
server on the machine running your Fossil instance(s), and you aren't
using Fossil's <tt>chroot</tt> feature to wall it off from the rest of
the machine, it's fairly simple to set up email notifications:

<ol>

<verbatim>
    Outgoing Email:	Piped to command "sendmail -t"
    Pending Alerts:	0 normal, 0 digest
    Subscribers:	0 active, 0 total
</verbatim>


<h4 id="subscribe">Subscribe to Alerts</h4>

Above, we see that there are no subscribers, so the next step is to add
one.

Go to the <tt>/alerts</tt> page on your Fossil instance and sign your
regular Fossil user up for email alerts. (Alternate path: click the user
name or login/logout link in the upper right corner, depending on the

This shows a key aspect of the way Fossil's email alerts system works,
by the way: a user can be signed up for email alerts without having a
full-fledged Fossil user account. Only when both user names are the same
are the two records tied together under the hood.


<h4 id="alert-test">Test the Email Subsystem</h4>

If you'd rather not create an inane "testing" post in your Fossil
instance just to force out an email alert, we can test the email
subsystem separately from the rest of the Fossil email alerts system
with the following command:

<verbatim>
    $ fossil alerts test-message you@example.com --body README.md --subject Test
</verbatim>

That should send you an email with "Test" in the subject line and the
contents of your project's <tt>README.md</tt> file in the body. If it
works, the file's contents may be truncated. I'm uncertain whether
that's due to an intentionally-small buffer size or if it's a bug.

That command assumes that your project [./foss-cklist.wiki | contains a
readme file]. Of course it does. Why would it not?


<h4 id="frist" name="first">First Post</h4>

Since you've already edited the skin per [#skin | the instructions
above], you can click the "Forum" link in the navbar and create a new
post. I suggest taking the time to compose a suitable introductory
message especially for your project's forum, one which a new user would
find helpful.

Wait a few seconds, and you should receive a notification email with the
post's subject and body text in the email.


<h4 id="trouble">Troubleshooting</h4>

If email alerts aren't working, there are several useful commands you
can give to figure out why.

(Be sure to [#cd | <tt>cd</tt> into a repo checkout directory] first!)

<verbatim>

    $ fossil ale send
</verbatim>

This only does the same thing as the final command above, rather than
send you an ale, as you might be hoping. Sorry.


<h2 id="moderation">Moderation</h2>

Fossil forum moderation is easy:

<ol>
    <li>Add the <b>Moderate Forum</b> (<tt>5</tt>) capability to any of
    your users who should have this ability. You don't need to do this
    for any user with Setup (<tt>s</tt>) or Admin (<tt>a</tt>)