Every time a new comment or trackback arrives here I get a new mail. Of course I read mails over IMAP, as I utilize a number of different clients. It always felt a bit clumsy to click a link to decide what happens with the new comment: should it be approved or deleted? At the end I decide twice a time what happens with the comment. First I click the link for approval or deletion, second I decide what to do with the notification mail. Why not couple these options? Every unread comment mail represents a moderated comment, if I delete the mail, the comment is deleted, if I just mark the mail as read, it will be approved. The good thing is, we have IMAP so the blog comment moderation daemon would be just another IMAP client that watches a single mail directory. Wouldn’t that be cool? Maybe Garvin would like that for Serendipity.
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Garvin opines:
published on 2009|01|10, 20:31hGenerally, I like the idea. Even though I think the current way of comment approving (s9y 1.4 supports a streamlined authentication token so that you don’t even need to login to confirm a comment/trackback), I like any idea to make it more easy for power-users like you and me.
However, I dislike using the "read state" as a way to indicate if a comment should be approved. You NEED to read a comment to see if you want to approve it, and if the daemon accidentaly logs in at that time, where the read state is "approve", the comment would immediately be approved. At least I always mark mails as read as soon as I see their contents, and not by explicitly "marking it as read". What do you think?
Another problematic thing is, that your s9y-webserver would need IMAP read privileges to be able to mark things as read. I myself fetch mails on my localhost only, and this one is not linked to my webserver, so I feel this could be a restriction as well.
Lars Strojny replies:
published on 2009|01|11, 17:34hI have similar reading habits. If I open a mail it is marked as read. But the IMAP listener could implement some delay before approving a comment (2 minutes would be sufficient). Than you are allowed to read the mail and do whatever you want with it.
I know about the streamlined approval process and I think it is great. For most of the users it will be fine too, but for me it is a click more I would love to get rid of.
Garvin returns:
published on 2009|01|11, 18:06hHm,does IMAP store the time an email was read? Otherwise, how can the IMAP listener detect if you read the mail X minutes ago?
How about the alternative of sub-IMAP folders "delete" and "approve"? Then you could move the mails into the subfolders to indicate the action you want to perform?
Lars Strojny answers:
published on 2009|01|11, 18:11hThere are two ways to implement that: first of all, the listener could always delay an action for n minutes. On the other hand I imagine a continously running listener, attached to the server using the IMAP IDLE extension (for the push or long-poll model). When the listener receives an event it adds the event to the working queue with a timestamp when it was added. In a threadless model like PHP every n minutes the IMAP IDLE resource goes into blocking mode and decides to process the queue. In a threaded programming language we would have two threads, on listening to IMAP, the other processing the incoming events. But the variant with the lazy delay should work fine.
fa reckons:
published on 2009|01|12, 11:36hFWIW, I like this approach much better.
In theory the idea with "Mark as read" sounds very good and it’s thinking outside the box, but, as already stated by Garvin, my mails are also automatically marked as read after 2sec, and more often than not I just quickly go over incoming mail and not instantly click on the links to look at the comments or "get it done" in general.
So, definitely wouldn’t work for me with the 2min threshold…
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