88156 - Random taglines (signature) in mail/news

Status: NEW

(MailNews Core :: Composition, enhancement)

Description

[Fernando Cassia]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.77 [en] (Win98; U)
BuildID:    0.91

A feature that has been available for over 10 YEARS in message editors  for 
Fidonet-style bbs networks has been the RANDOM taglines.

I miss this feature ever since I left the BBS scene, and would like to see it 
added to Mozilla. What's more, it would be TRIVIAL to implement.

It could be done in two ways:
a) A drop-down box on Edit->Mail and News Prefs, on top of the current  check 
box "Use this signature", where one could choose between two options: 1) Use 
this signature: (filename), or 2) Use a random signature from this folder: (let 
the user choose a folder that contains lots of .sig signature files, which are 
choosen randomly every time a new message is composed).

b) Instead of a folder, select a single ".sig" file, which contains some special 
header (@MULTIPLE_SIGS on line1 comes to mind), and then the different 
signatures separated by some special char, all on a flat ascii file.

One way or another, it would be trivial to add and VERY useful!. I could start 
using my collection of taglines which I've saved from the BBS days (and there 
are tagline collections for QWK readers everywhere, which could be converted and 
used).

Thanks for your time...

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.Select a signature file
2.Compose a message
3.Send the message

Actual Results:  The email message alway has the same boring signature

Expected Results:  I should be able to enable "random taglines", and have 
mozilla choose a new fresh, colorful tagline out of several hundred I have 
collected over the years.

Comment 1

[Matthew Cline]

Seems like a good idea, and doesn't seem to be a duplicate.  Confirming.

Comment 2

[Petr Cerny [:hrosik]]

I just wanted to create a new bug and found out it would be duplicate.
I'm missing this feature from old Fidonet-mailers too.

Comment 3

[Fernando Cassia]

Hehe, nice to see I'm not the only one :-)

I just wish I had the programming knowledge to do this myself...

Comment 4

[Daniel Wang]

*** Bug 162583 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 5

[Petr Cerny [:hrosik]]

As far as I understand this, taglines are not signature or a part of it.

Comment 6

[Timo Virkkala]

I thought about this also. I'm going to get the sources soon and look into them.
This was one of the ideas I had on my mental "Mozilla to-do" list =)
So, if I can, I think I'll try to implement it.

Comment 7

[Bernd Wurst]

I thing the easies way would be to implement an option "take std-output from
application". It's time of 5 min. to write an app that pics random-lines from a
.sig-file and thows them on standard-out. There would be many advantages if sig
may be created by the output of an app. (That's the way e.g. Sylpheed and KMail
do it!)

Comment 8

[Bengt Bergholm]

Just throwing in my vote for this feature to put the spotlight here again...
status, anyone? Good old FidoNet style taglines, my editor was GoldED w/ XTAG :)

Comment 9

[Andrés G. Aragoneses]

Hello. I am also interested on this RFE. But I understand it in other way:

IMHO, a tagline is not a signature. So, a random tagline should not replace the
normal signature. Then, the option could use a "Check button" instead of a
"Radio button". I think also that using a program to generate a random sentence
is too complicated for this bug. I think it is very simple. We could add an UI
like this:

[X] Attach this signature:

[_______________________] <Choose...>


[X] Use a random tag line from:

[_______________________] <Choose...>


The file selected would be like a signature file, with plain text format. And to
separate the taglines we could use, for example, the EOL character (allowing n
EOLs characters, so files contenting taglines could be more readable...).

I still don't know how to hack on Mozilla code, but I am a programmer and I
think this is not difficult. Firstly, we would make a kind of "parser" meant to
count the tag lines in the file, and then, when a new message is composed (or a
new identity is selected, because tagline-files should be associated with the
mail/news accounts), we would need a routine that generates a random number from
1 to M (being M the number of taglines in the file) and, using M, selects a
tagline and appends it to the end of the message body.

Perhaps, a new improvement to this feature would be a new button on the Message
Composing window, that, when pressed, could delete the tagline, calculate a new
random number (different from the last one) and put a different tagline (because
sometimes we don't like a specific tagline to be inserted, depending for whom
the message is).

Well, I hope you agree me. Let's discuss it ;) 

Giving one of my votes to the bug!

Comment 10

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

Does this sounds like a dup of 62993 ?

Comment 11

[Bengt Bergholm]

How can a new feature request be a dupe of a bug? This functionality does not exist today in TB, not without addons anyway.

Comment 12

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

because bug 62993 would permit to do some random timeline signature. Note that I did not dup it i was more asking the question to myself.

Comment 13

[Bengt Bergholm]

Ah, ok!

Comment 14

[klonos]

Bug 62993 doesn't suggest a user interface though. Plus the fact that bug 62993 is only for Linux whereas this one, like bug 30328 (marked as a dupe of 62993 - that's wrong IMO), are requests for a UI in all platforms.

So I think not a dupe and also should remove the 'dupe to bug 62993' from bug 30328.

Finally, yes this bug looks similar to 30328, but concerns SeaMonkey while 30328 is MailNews Core.

[placing equivalent comment on bug 30328]

Comment 15

[Jens Müller (:tessarakt)]

"taglines"? I thought the short newsgroup descriptions are called taglines ...

Comment 16

[Petr Cerny [:hrosik]]

I suggest closing, as there is an add-on implementing this http://tagzilla.mozdev.org/