A new web newsreader

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 12/9/11 11:03 AM, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
> This goes a bit beyond the project's initial scope, since all I wanted
> was to create something for D... There would be a good amount of work
> involved in refactoring it in such a way so that it could be easily set
> up and used for other projects. It would be much easier if the need
> appeared before this work is started, so that there would be a clear
> goal for what needs to be modularized, configurable and customizable.

I understand. So you want to approach this by serving forum content off 
your own server under the guise of d-programming-language.org. This 
should be fine.

>> Please advise on how to best proceed in the short and long term. I
>> think in the short term we can run off your domain (with the visible
>> URLs using top domain d-programming-language.org), and migrate later
>> to a classic product installation configuration that will preserve the
>> URLs.
>
> Sorry, I'm not following you again. Perhaps there was a misunderstanding
> regarding how much the program is tied to my server? As it is, all data
> (newsgroup/mailing list posts, users and user preferences) are stored in
> a single SQLite database file. Assuming all necessary build tools (of
> which only D is a requirement) are present, the program otherwise has no
> other dependencies - it doesn't even need a separate web server (like
> Apache). So, other users of the program would run it on their own
> server, and have their own database of everything on their server's
> filesystem.

Great. The remaining mid-term issue is as follows. Right now you own the 
database, which entails some fiduciary responsibilities. Think 
"unexpected": if e.g. you get hit by a bus (God forbid), the database is 
virtually lost. This scenario is solved by your granting e.g. Walter 
access to the server, so he can copy the database and possibly migrate 
the installation.

But then say you and Walter have a huge disagreement over a core issue, 
which makes you furious. Then you could revoke Walter's login and/or 
destroy the database. And so on.

Also, privacy is not a biggie right now because the database contains 
public information plus some simple preferences, but later you could 
store additional information of various degrees of sensitivity. So you 
would in fact responsible for users' privacy, but 
d-programming-language.org is the ostensible responsible.

How do you think we could solve this issue?


Andrei