Into the blue again after the money’s gone

A reason that I finally implemented better thread navigation for the PHP mailing list archives is because it was a bit of unfinished business — I had implemented it for the MySQL mailing lists (RIP), but never brought it back over to the PHP mailing lists. There, it accessed the MySQL database used by the Colobus server directly, but this time I exposed what I needed through NNTP.

An advantage to doing it this way is that anyone can still clone the site and run it against the NNTP server during development without needing any access to the database server. There may be future features that require coming up with ways of exposing more via NNTP, but I suspect a lot of ideas will not.

Another reason to implement thread navigation was that a hobby of mine is poking at the history of the PHP project, and I wanted to make it easier to dive into old threads like this thread from 2013 when Anthony Ferrara, a prominent PHP internals developer, left the list. (The tweet mentioned in the post is gone now, but you can find it and more context from this post on his blog.)

Reading this very long thread about the 2016 RFC to adopt a Code of Conduct (which never came to a vote) was another of those bits of history that I knew was out there but hadn’t been able to read quite so easily.

Which just leads me to tap the sign and point out that there is a de facto Code of Conduct and a group administering it.

I think implementing a search engine for the mailing list archives may be an upcoming project because it is still kind of a hassle to dig threads up. I’m thinking of using Manticore Search. Probably by building it into Colobus and exposing it via another NNTP extension.