[geeklog-devel] SOCNET

[Joe Mucchiello]

I'm away from my main email....

Randy wrote:
> How do we handle requests to join a group?  (That would include requests 
> FROM a group owner to a user and vice versa.) 
> How do we handle blacklisting people?  How do we handle a user removing 
> themselves from a group for which they are not owner of? How do we 
> handle administration of all of this?  How do we manage privacy? How do 
> I manage receiving email alerts for content added for groups I am a part 
> of? 
> All of that extra "stuff" would have to be part of core. 


No, none of it has to be in core. Since it sounds like a socnet plugin is desired, once my patch is made, core never has to care about social networking ever again. The socnet plugin would handle the friendship handshake, group management, etc. All that core has to do is treat group type "2" as something invisible to the administrators. (The socnet plugin can provide the ability to peak inside a group if needed since that is something a socnet admin would do.) 

Now you do bring up something that would nice to have in core: bulk email handling, queuing and throttling. But email features are useful outside of social networking. There is a feature request and I think a GSOC project for this as well. I've written many messages about email throttling in the past.


Dirk wrote:
> I have never even used Facebook and have no idea how their login process 
> works and whether or not it could use the remote authentication API ... 

I believe the Facebook Connect login works like OpenID does. Think about it from security: You do not provide your Facebook password to some random website so they can log you in to Facebook. Geeklog probably needs to overhaul this feature since the OpenID (and Facebook) model where you never, ever type your password into a 3rd party website makes a lot more sense from a security point of view than the Geeklog assumption that users will gladly provide some random Geeklog site with their livejournal login and password.