On 25Oct2022 17:26, Patrick O'Callaghan <pocallaghan@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
As Pete point out earlier, that doesn't mean it keeps working exactly
as it does now. Read his post for details.
To be clear, I mean the post I pointed to in the head item of this
thread, i.e.
https://mail.gnome.org/archives/evolution-list/2022-October/msg00276.html
I'd mentioned that threading's fixed in current Discourse, but I though
I'd take some of the other points in this post from my perspective
(email user, long mailing list experience, likes email a lot).
So, Pete Biggs wrote:
As a mailing list replacement.
=============================
We have been told that we just need to login once to Discourse and set
things up, then all interaction will be by email and we won't notice
any difference. Really? What planet are they on?
Discourse does try to present a decent email experience. It is not
perfect, but I use email instead of the web forum almost all the time.
No topic tags on emails. So no easy way to filter topics. If you
watch more than one topic, all mails are the same.
Discourse divides a forum into catgeories and topics. Categories are the
various forum areas, and topics are discussions (the topic is the
`Subject:` line).
You can see the categories for the Python Discourse forum here:
https://discuss.python.org/
You can filter on "topic" using the `Subject` header.
You can filter on category using the `List-ID` header. For example, my
mail filer uses this rule:
python discuss-users list-id:/<python-help.discuss.python.org>
to file messages in my "python" folder with the `X-Label`
"discuss-users", which is presented in my folder index in my mail reader
(mutt).
Own posts not notified of. It removes context for a mailing list. I
keep copies of mailing list posts as a sort of private archive -
mainly so I can see what I've answered to queries before. That's
gone.
Annoying, agreed. I keep a copy of my message in the source folder
locally for exactly this purose. But it's something my personal setup
arranges, not Discourse.
Slow or sporadic email notifications make discussion difficult.
I've found these fairly good, myself. Notifications using the app? An
open Discourse web page? Your mail system as the email version arrives?
No or broken threading on emails. This one is so annoying. Doesn't
any of the people who use Discourse use threading anywhere. Context
is everything.
As mentioned, now fixed.
Plain text emails sent to Discourse have formatting mangled (white
space isn't honoured). There's no point in nicely formatting plain
text, it will be mangled. (These indents will be lost - if I sent it
there.)
Plain text messages are interpreted as Markdown. Frankly, this is good!
I can preserve code indents by marking code as such, either with code
fences (triple backticks):
```
the code
goes here
```
or by indenting by at least 4 spaces:
indented code
goes here
etc etc
which works perfectly. I use the latter.
As a bonus the code looks like code and the prose is in a nice variable
width font. (On the web forum.)
Mails are really just notifications - there's no nested quoting of
content to provide context. You can choose to have previous replies
at bottom or include an excerpt, but that's not contextual quoting.
As with ordinary email, this depends on the author of the post.
Discourse has a feature where you can do a quoted reply; on the web I
access it by selecting some text in the web forum and pressing the reply
button. In email, I do a regular inline-and-trim reply as in this
message.
You can see one of my posts with here, composed from email:
https://discuss.python.org/t/requesting-a-code-review/20107/4
Each email copy of a post has a link to the web version of the post at
the bottom; I sometimes use that to visit the forum for context.
Cheers,
Cameron Simpson <cs@xxxxxxxxxx>
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