Bug 352008

Comment 1 Denis Roy 2011-07-20 09:47:14 EDT

This is intentional.  NNTP users need to type in their email address and can mangle it (or not) as they please, whereas forum access requires a real, validated email address which the user cannot obfuscate.  With the old setup, no matter how I tried to mangle the bugzilla email address for forum posts, I'd always get some email from someone who claims we've violated their privacy and now they're receiving spam by the truckload.  

I believe that, in today's age of online web app things, when folks enter an email address they expect that it will not be used publicly.

Before I close this as WONTFIX, does this actually cause a problem, or were you 'just asking' ?

Comment 2 Eric Rizzo 2011-07-20 11:19:19 EDT

It seems that this is a side-effect of users not specifying a real name when registering. I understand (and mostly agree with) the reasoning for using the forums-noreply address, but when the user's account has no "real name" it makes it impossible to know who a particular message is coming from in NNTP. At least some indicator would be an improvement.

Here's the From: header of a user with a real name set:

From: chavi  <forums-noreply@eclipse.org>

Here it is when the user has no Real Name:

From:   <forums-noreply@eclipse.org>


Would it be reasonable to either:
a) force users to specify a name when they register
or
b) hack FUD Forum so that, in the absence of a real name, it uses the portion of their email address before the @ character?

Comment 3 Denis Roy 2011-07-21 09:02:15 EDT

I think b) is reasonable.

Comment 4 Denis Roy 2011-07-21 10:30:16 EDT

I've solved this with a database trigger instead of a code hack.  It will set a real name in the database table using the front portion of the email address if no real name is defined.  This will also remove all the 'No Real Name' posts from the web ui.

CREATE TRIGGER u_fud_users_alias BEFORE UPDATE ON fud_users 
FOR EACH ROW BEGIN
    IF NEW.name = '' THEN 
        SET NEW.name = left(NEW.email, locate("@", NEW.email) -1); 
    END IF; 
    SET NEW.alias = NEW.name; 
END;

Comment 5 Denis Roy 2011-07-21 10:30:41 EDT

Of course, this will not change existing posts where the name is missing, but all future posts should be fixed.