344833 - Inform user whether a newsgroups is moderated or not when posting.

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, enhancement)

Description

[Alex]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.3) Gecko/20060326 Firefox/1.5.0.3 (Debian-1.5.dfsg+1.5.0.3-2)
Build Identifier: version 1.5.0.4 (20060516)

Newsgroup moderation status is (usually) from the newsgroup list (using the NNTP "list" command). For example:
A moderated group indicated by "m":
ukc.adverts 0000046038 0000046035 m
An unmoderated group indicated by "y":
alt.culture.ukc.misc 0000044954 0000044953 y

This would be very useful instead of wondering why a message hasn't appeared in the group.


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
Click "Write" to create a new message.
Actual Results:  
New message window appears, lacking moderation information.

Expected Results:  
Informed that the group is moderated.

Comment 1

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Sounds reasonable.

Comment 2

[Christian Eyrich]

I'm currently about extending list parser and hostinfo.dat to hold the info on that post flag. Post count and also group description (from LIST NEWSGROUPS command, see RFC 2980) will also be handled.
For now I inserted another column in the subscribe dialogue to show the post flag. The newsreader KNode shows and alert if one subscribes to a moderated newsgroup. And Alex wrote about informing the user on message composition.

I need some suggestions if, where, when and how exactly those informations should be showed. I.e. alert when leaving the subscribe dialogue? Alert when trying to send to a moderated group? Alert when starting to compose mail for a moderated group? Printed "moderated" somewhere into the composing window? Something like that.

Comment 3

[Christian Eyrich]

Attachment: raw first attempt

That's just the current state of effort. That post flag is called writeable, should named something else.
It's displayed in a new column of the subscribe dialogue, but I wasn't able to hide it in case of Subscribable-false (see CSS file).

Other things I don't like:
-Chaning nsISubscribableServer interface because this also affects IMAP server.
-How the hostinfo.dat is written out (WriteHostInfoFile()/writeGroupToHostInfoFile()/WriteHostInfoFile()). Getting subscribable and writeable (and msg count and group description in future) from nsSubscribableServer (including i.e. FindAndCreateNode() for every field for every group) is damn slow.

Suggestions are more than welcome.

Comment 4

[Armando Villani]

This is a really useful feature. Outlook Express has it and show the moderation warning directly in the newsgroup name bar (above message frame). So I can see the newsgroup is moderated before pushing Write. I would prefer this implementation but Thunderbird doesn't have a similar bar. However adding the warning after the newsgroup name is a good solution. E.g. "Newsgroups: comp.test (Moderated)". This doesn't exclude adding a warning when I start to write too.

Comment 5

[Martin von Gagern]

I'd also love to see this information somewhere.
I'm against any kind of warning messages that would get in your way,
so if you pop up anything, make sure future notifications can be disabled.
How about using different kinds of icons in the folder tree?
A short note next to the newsgroup name sounds like a good idea as well.
You might also display a notice in the statusbar of the compose window, especially if there is nothing more important to display right now.

Comment 7

[Lu Wei]

Really a must-have feature