GroupServer 14.11 — Calvados Consumed Covertly

Authors:Michael JasonSmith;
Contact:Michael JasonSmith <mpj17@onlinegroups.net>
Date:2014-11-25
Organization:GroupServer.org
Copyright:This document is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License by OnlineGroups.net.

Introduction

The major changes to GroupServer in the Calvados release include improved internationalisation, and updated email commands. You can get Calvados immediately.

Changes to GroupServer

The most extensive change in Calvados is the new internationalisation. There are also updated email commands, updated email headers better reporting of bouncing email addresses, and the new change group-type page. Finally there have been some minor code improvements.

Internationalisation

Alice Rose has lead an effort to add internationalisation to GroupServer. So far internationalisation support has been added to the following products.

  • The core page template that lays out the page
  • The Join page
  • The site homepage
    • The Welcome area and Change welcome page
    • The About area and Change about page
    • The Admin area
    • The Groups lists
    • The Topics list
  • The Change site name page
  • The Change site timezone page
  • The Start a group page
  • The Search for a site member page
  • (Some) of the Site statistics page
  • The Change group properties page

Status of internationalisation topic in the GroupServer Development group is a good place to follow the improvements to internationalisation. We welcome any and all efforts to improve the internationalisation for GroupServer.

Updated email commands

The system for handling email commands has been completely rewritten and improved. Five commands are currently supported.

Unsubscribe:This is the most commonly used command. It removes the group-member that sent the command from the group. See the gs.group.member.leave product for more information.
Subscribe:This used to join a public group. A person who registers this way will be unable to log in, because he or she will have no password. In addition public groups are rare it has limited use. However, tradition dictates that a Subscribe command is supported. See the gs.group.member.subscribe product for more information.
Confirm:This message, the companion to Subscribe, is used to ensure that a person wants to join a group. See the gs.group.member.subscribe product for more information.
Digest on:This is used to switch to the topic-digest. See the gs.group.member.email.settings product for more information.
Digest off:This is used to switch to one email per post. See the gs.group.member.email.settings product for more information.

The implementation of the new email commands closes Bug 3403.

Updated email headers

The system for updating email headers has also been completely rewritten. The previous system relied on page-templates defined in the ZMI, which was very hard to update, and harder to test. The gs.group.list.sender product now defines the fourteen email headers that are deleted, added, or modified. The implementation of the new headers closes Bug 267.

In addition the various List headers have been added, which closes Issue 3785.

Reporting of bouncing email addresses

When an email message cannot be delivered often a bounce message will be set back to the system that sent the message. For many years GroupServer has kept track of these bounce messages; if an address of a group-member causes bounces on five separate days in a 60 day window then that email address is set to unverified.

The new Bounces page now shows the group administrator a record of the bouncing email addresses. In addition a notification is sent to the administrator when the email address of a group member is disabled. If the member has any additional email addresses then notifications is sent to these addresses also.

The updating of the bounce-handling system closes Feature 3614, Feature 3772 and Feature 3773.

Change group-type

There are four types of group supported by GroupServer:

Calvados introduces the Change group-type page, which allows the type of group to be quickly and easily changed, closing Feature 702.

Minor code improvements

Get Calvados

To get Calvados go to the Downloads page for GroupServer and follow the GroupServer Installation documentation. Those who already have a functioning installation can update an existing GroupServer system.

Update an Existing GroupServer System

To update a system running the Slivovica release of GroupServer (14.06) to Calvados (14.11) carry out the following steps.

  1. Download the Calvados tar-ball from the GroupServer download page.

  2. Uncompress the tar-ball:

    $ tar cfz groupserver-14.11.tar.gz

  3. Change to the directory that contains your existing GroupServer installation.

  4. Copy the new version-configuration files to your existing GroupServer installation:

    $ cp ../groupserver-14.11/[biv]*cfg  .

  5. In your existing GroupServer installation run:

    $ ./bin/buildout -n

  6. Restart your GroupServer instance.

TODO:Update the table with the confirmation IDs for the new subscription command