CUNY Academic Commons

Instead of a new address schema, with a new UI to support the creation and management of such addresses, we can simply change the way that we handle a single message that's sent to more than one address at a time. Say you want to post to three groups A, B, C. So you send to three addresses: group-A@commons, group-B@commons, group-C@commons. When RBE receives the message, it sees that there are three recipients, and the Commons, which has the "multiple group post" feature, is able to hook in at this point and interpret it as a multiple-group-post. This, in turn, will disable the duplicate-post checks, and also trigger the other mechanisms of cross-group posting, such as activity/notification consolidation.

Ray, what would it take to enable this kind of behavior in RBE? Specifically, considering that multiple-group-posting is a custom feature for the Commons. How could RBE be modified so that there's a natural place for us to hook in? Maybe there's a place where you translate the 'To' address into the group ID, we could hook in here and say that group-A is the "primary" forum for this specific post, and then add the necessary metadata so that the cross-posting happens automatically after topic creation (in effect mimicking the cross-post checkboxes when posting from the web)?

In this way, if a user has a collection of groups to which they regularly cross-post, they can set up an address group in their mail client, rather than needing a custom tool for CAC.

My concern about this is that the syntax is too specific and opaque. Users like Matt will figure it out, but few others will. (Then again, multiple-group-post-by-email is a power-user feature in the first place, so maybe the distinction is not important.)

Totally spitballing, because I have very little understanding of how RBE works, but couldn't the mailbox checker logic account for duplicates? If it sees three identical emails (aside from the recipient +prefix) can't it identify them as being related, designate one as the primary, then mark the other two as duplicates of the first and cease processing them? The advantage here, again, is that we use the existing "syntax" of multiple recipients, which feels much more natural.

Obviously, if this won't work with the RBE internals, then feel free to dismiss :) It would be nice to hear some feedback from Matt on your proposed syntax before moving ahead with it.

(Then again, multiple-group-post-by-email is a power-user feature in the first place, so maybe the distinction is not important.)

That was my initial thought. Only a few power users would probably use it.

but couldn't the mailbox checker logic account for duplicates?

The scenario above is if we utilize the Multiple Forum Post plugin specifically to accomplish multiple forum topics by email.

If we don't use the Multiple Forum Post plugin, then we could remove RBE's restriction on the To: field quite easily and then remove the duplicate content check that bbPress uses during posting. (This is all theoretical at the moment.) With this approach, no shortcode syntax would be necessary. This is better for usability, however this posting logic would be executed more than once depending on how many group email addresses are added to the To: field.

You also wouldn't see the "This topic was also posted in" line that the Multiple Forum Post plugin provides when you use this functionality on the frontend, but maybe this isn't that big of a deal.

One other thing I've noted before in another ticket is removing the duplicate content check makes it very easy to spam other groups. Maybe this isn't an issue for us on the Commons, but I note it again just to remind everybody of what could happen.

I think the positives of this second approach might outweigh the negatives, especially if we only limit multiple forum topic functionality to group administrators.

#13827 will address an issue to allow duplicate forum topics to be posted. This also affects this ticket and will, as a side-effect, allow multiple group topics to be posted via email. You can do this by adding your group topic email addresses to the "To" header in your email client.

The discourse above was mostly an attempt to try and utilize the existing Multiple Forum Post plugin that we use on the frontend for a potential integration with RBE. Most of that entailed a complicated syntax, but I think we don't have to worry about that anymore. I basically implemented the second approach as I mentioned in comment 8.

I'm going to mark this as a duplicate of #13827.