Re: [s-d] proposal parser

[Daniel Lepage <dpl33@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Here's a thought. What if rather than have a bunch of email-based  
tools, we bundled them together as plugins to a common interface? I'm  
envisioning something like this:

B Nomic Standard Email Interface

1. People
  Any person can sign up for the service by choosing a username and a  
password, and specifying at least one email address. A person can add  
multiple email addresses if e wants to. When the interface receives  
an email, it will determine who sent it based on the sending address;  
if the address doesn't match any known address, then it looks for a  
password within the message to identify the user.

2. Security
  Each person can set their own security settings. Maybe e only wants  
it to accept email that comes from one of eir registered addresses  
AND contains eir password, or maybe e even wants it to rely on PGP  
encryption. By letting the user choose, you ensure that anyone who  
wants advanced measures like PGP can have them, but anyone who  
doesn't care as much needn't bother.

3. Modules
  There are a number of modules that the service can use. The chosen  
module can be specified within the subject of the message, so that  
"[Proposal]" in the subject line selects the proposal handler,  
"[Escrow]" selects the escrow agent, etc. Some modules would be  
restricted to certain users - for example, only Peter could start/ 
stop the clock through this system.

4. Headers
  The system looks for the delimiter "------" in the body of the  
message; everything before that line is parsed as parameters to the  
module, and everything after is treated as the text for the module.  
The proposal module could then look for a parameter along the lines  
of "Amend: True" to find out that this is an amendment to a previous  
proposal, for example, and the dice roller module can use these  
parameters to find out who to send the resulting message to.

5. Generality
  The key advantage of this is that it can be provide a common  
authentication framework for many different systems, so that we could  
add future modules to it easily and they'd known immediately how to  
determine who sent a message and how to parse basic parameters from  
the top of the message.

Am I crazy, or would this work?

-- 
Wonko

_______________________________________________
spoon-discuss mailing list
spoon-discuss@xxxxxxxxx
http://lists.ellipsis.cx/mailman/listinfo/spoon-discuss