Postgres forums ... take 2

Hi again,

I've taken in all the feedback about http://forums.postgresql.com.au and the general consensus is that nobody wants a separate entity - a few people mentioned that if it was interoperable with the mailing list that it would be better. So I did.

The concept goes like this;
1. Any posts to the general mailing list will be picked up by the forum, the email data is converted and posted on the forum, for example;
http://forums.postgresql.com.au/viewtopic.php?f=30&t=39
2. Any reply to the forum will do the reverse and send the post back to the mailing list as a reply.

This means the forum can be fully controlled through the mailing list without the need to visit the forums directly. However those people who prefer to use a forum interface can, and those messages are relayed back through the mailing list to get answered.

Step 1 is complete (might need a little tweaking, i've only tried it with a couple of topics.) Step 2 I haven't begun - wanted to get some more feedback.

All the forum topics and posts are back-dated to match the emails, which means it would be *theoretically* possible to load in the entire postgres mailing list archive but I wouldn't do that on a server that couldn't handle that much data.

Disclaimer about user names:
User names are registered automatically based on the unique email address of the person emailing the response. Each user is given a random 8 character password. You can use the recover password page to login to your account and change your user name to anything you want, the only important thing is that your email address matches.

I know this is a sensitive issue with some people, i've made sure no information is posted thats not already currently being indexed by google.

The only maintenance I can see is that all new topics are pushed into the General > Other category as the script can't differentiate what category it should in fact belong to, once the topic is moved it will stay there. This shouldn't be a real problem as theres not many new topics being created on any given day.

Cheers,
Elliot