This really should be a UUID or something else totally unexpected
but I figure that crc32 is good enough for now. The reason we keep
the main structure is because some third party scripts have begun
relying upon the tag URI format to parse out domain name, type etc.
This means we import the URI string from remote instances to track their
conversations and are able to stitch together replies in a single thread.
We might have to try to avoid collisions so noone remotely can predict
conversation URIs which we generate on our server, causing a DoS kind of
problem.
This will work without much extra effort because there will always be
more notices (higher value) than conversations (so no collisions).
But please run upgrade.php to avoid having an autoincrement id on
conversation table.
Installations using code after 2014-03-01 will have identical
conversation IDs to the initial (conversation root) notice IDs. This
will not affect older installations, which will have very different
values.
The parent class for our database objects, Managed_DataObject, has a
dynamically assigned class in staticGet which objects get put into,
leaving us with less code to do the same thing.
We will probably have to move away from the DB_DataObject 'staticGet'
call as it is nowadays deprecated.