[ale] requests for help

[Mike]

I had an idea at lunch today that I've been tossing around in my head
for a bit, and seems fairly feasible to implement.  So I figured I'd
bring it up for discussion and see what everyone though.

There are a lot of emails sent back and forth on the list every day, but
if you get down the the marrow of it, there are some very obvious
groupings of subjects, such as distro installation help, X,
ipchains/tables, coding, etc...  

So I was thinking of a catagorization code that could accompany each
email sent so as to segregate it out, and allow for a parser engine to
pickup the code and drop the contents of the email into a normalized
database for archiving and searching topics.  The basic layout could be
somthing like this:

[alf: GeneralSubjectID + SubSubjectID + TopicID + MessageID ]

(NOTE: alf == "ale list format", and I like Alf anyway)

So a simple explanation would be

0001 Programming:   (GeneralSubject)
1002 - Linux       (SubSubject)
2342   - Network   (Topic)
2347   - Graphics
2001 - Unix
3456   - Kernel
3457   - Security
9111 - Windows
2342   - Graphics
1337   - Sound


So lets say I had a question about Programming Graphics in both Unix and
Linux.  I could format the message like this

[alf:0001+1002|2001+2342+00000001]

Notice the "|" separating the two id's in the SubSubject field, this
allows you to cross link, so that you can catagorize somthing in
multiple categories.  

The hardest part about implementing somthing like this would be making
it easy to use, so I'm attempting (emphasis on ATTEMPT) to hack together
a simple C app for linux that uses the starndard X libs to get input via
select fields, so all you have to do is select your topics and it will
generate your inital sequence.  The second step would be to assign
everyone on the list a unique id for the last field in the sequence or
just use a large number and do random number generation.  

This is just a really rough inital idea, but I think it would be a
really good tool for archiving and crosslinking, maybe even somthing
that could be developed into a standard for mailing lists like this, I
dunno.  I'm also not sure if using numbers for the sequnce fields is the
best idea either, maybe somthing like the GeekCode format.  

Let me know what you think.  :)

-- mike

-- 

================================
Michael Lockhart - PHP Developer
Intercosmos Media Group
mailto:mlockhart at intercosmos.com
http://orbital.intercosmos.net
================================

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