Hi dgermann,
I read w4an's post at the URL you gave, and it was a good article. I agreed with everything there. I also agree with you on email participation as well as no ? in the URLs.
I guess the biggest hurdle with email participation is authentication and direction. Authentication meaning is this person who he says he is and direction meaning where in the threads should this email go? In addition, someone replying by email will be much further behind on the conversation than someone who's just visited the site and replied, and for boards who do daily subscriptions (as opposed to hourly) you could really get some late posters and such. If the code were changed so that every post to a forum you were subscribed to would be emailed to you immediately (sort of like the "someone replied to your post at" stuff we get), then I could see this being a viable option. It would definitely need to be a configurable option since a lot of folks have to keep an eye on their bandwidth.
As far as the email stuff goes, responding via email would definitely have its benefits, at least for the user, one major one being convenience. But the code I see accompanying this feature would be quite intense, since we'd have to devise some way of preventing other users from claiming they're you, sticking that one email in the correct thread (sometimes people don't keep the "Re:" in their message), code a receiving engine to parse the email correctly so that we can read everything correctly and disregard what we don't need, and probably some other stuff I'm forgetting.
If we're going to go through the trouble of coding all of that, we might as well build a module to let users receive an email list (majordomo or something similar) and parse the emails into WWWThreads. It would be a great archiving feature (I'm on a few myself).
As far as getting the question marks out of the URL, I'm by no means an expert in perl yet, but I don't see an easy way of doing this currently (that's not to say there isn't an easy way, just personally don't know of one). If it's accurate that search engines ignore URLs after the question mark then it may benefit the software to take a closer look at how to omit it.
Thanks for the URL, too. It was a good read. I might have to visit this site more often. <img border="0" title="" alt="[Smile]" src="images/icons/smile.gif" />
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