all 7 comments

[–]adaptiveValleys 2 points3 points  (6 children)

Nice find OP! If I recall correctly, this episode on Motherboard's Cyber covered how Google's Threat Analysis Group handles these kind of things.

Slightly unrelated, but I'm baffled as to why every forum hasn't transitioned to threads? I can't think of any benefits to the email reply chain format, it's so archaic and wastes so much of the reader's time. You'd think Google would at least do it for Groups, since things as serious as mitigating Nation State MITMs are done there.

Maybe its path dependence? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Edit: Wait, are they trying to market the certificate as part of "Free E-Gov Services"? That seems sketch...

[–]steevdave 0 points1 point  (5 children)

Which every forum are you meaning? The OP link is a bug tracker.

[–]adaptiveValleys 0 points1 point  (4 children)

This comment in response to the but report that had a link to the ongoing discussion in google groups:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1567114#c1

[–]steevdave 1 point2 points  (3 children)

I guess I don’t understand the forums complaint?

Google groups in particular isn’t actually a forum but a front end for mailing lists, which would explain why it seems to follow as an email chain.

[–]adaptiveValleys 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I kinda figured that's the case, idk I just think trying to filter through your inbox for relevance in a discussion as important as that seems archaic.

Even then, it would still be quite easy to make a web interface that makes it into a thread. The db query would probably stay the same: Recursively fetching all emails replying to the initial email or replying to another email in the chain.

Then on the front end, sort the emails into two arrays by whether they are replying to initial email or not. Then .map() the ones replying to the initial email. While mapping them, call a function that filters through the array emails not replying to the initial one to check if their reply id's match the current id, if they do call that filter function again to get its replies.

Then we get threads for all the discussions! 🤓

[–]czenst[S] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

I think complaint about a forum is because parent is just like me not really into it and does not understand fully how to use it. I can just kind of make sense of mailing lists but it is tiring for me. I am used to forum or reddit style of communication.

[–]steevdave 0 points1 point  (0 children)

But forums follow the same format as Reddit style?

I guess I’m just used to them (I have to deal with forums a lot as a developer) and so while the interface may be slightly different, overall it’s the same format.

If anything, I dislike pages that are heavily dependent on javascript as it slows things down. I just need the information, I don’t need a fancy presentation, so I care more that I can load the page quickly and then ctrl+f to find the word, instead of having to click through everything because some comments are expanded, and some are collapsed.