A Guide on using this site via email

amapanda_ᚐᚋᚐᚅᚇᚐ · 2022-10-04T13:47:47.000Z

While using this discourse forum via email, I’ve learned some things. Let’s work on a guide for how to use this forum via email. We can start on the OSM wiki, rather than cluttering messages here. Community forum - OpenStreetMap Wiki

nukeador · 2022-10-04T13:56:40.035Z

I’ve turned your message here into wiki mode so people can collaborate directly editing your first message.

o_andras · 2022-10-30T11:54:08.661Z

If you actually find a good explanation of how the Discourse ML mode works and how to get it to work well, please, please, please, share it with me. To the best of my knowledge (and I’ve been using Discourse for a pretty long time (mainly on other instances)) the ML mode is nothing like a ML, it sucks real bad.

SomeoneElse · 2022-10-30T13:12:11.000Z

(not that this is directly related to the original thread topic, but)

the ML mode is nothing like a ML, it sucks real bad.

Can you explain what the problem is in a bit more detail? I’m using Discourse here 90% in mailing list mode, and the advantages (decent threading and filtering) certainly outweigh the disadvantages (e.g. detection of replied-to text not 100%).

o_andras · 2022-10-30T22:55:30.243Z

Unfortunately for me, my experience using Discourse on Thunderbird is not as good as yours.

I trust that filtering works well, they’re just emails after all…

You say “decent threading” but I get none of that: each individual post in any (Discourse) thread whatsoever always arrives as its own email, not as part of any (email) thread.

Replying to other peoples’ posts from email is also unreliable because people may have edited their posts in the meantime, possibly making your own reply invalid/obsolete/nonsense. To me, this is a big problem: I put effort into writing to others. If what I’m replying to changes and invalidates my reply, it’s wasted effort.

The quoting problem you mention is not a small one either: no email client understands this:

[quote="SomeoneElse", post:NN, topic:NNNN"]
the quoted text
[/quote]

Because that’s not how text is quoted in email.

Granted, this may be only applicable to text email; maybe HTML email works well enough, visually. But if I’m going to read my email in HTML, might as well use the web interface and get the full bloated experience, as the devs have intended…

Someone could also argue that this is not Discourse’s problem – “if email clients don’t understand Discourse quote syntax, sucks to be you… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯”. My reply to that would be that Discourse is the platform advertising ML mode, not the other way around. As I said on the discussion of this proposal’s predecessor, feels like “ML mode” is only pro forma, “to stop old dogs from barking too loud”.

Oh and I can’t seem to find how to properly subscribe/unsubscribe to tags/categories. I’ve never been so bombarded with spam since I joined this Discourse and enabled ML mode… There’s very likely a setting for this but I haven’t found it yet.

SomeoneElse · 2022-10-31T11:16:02.843Z

o_andras:

You say “decent threading” but I get none of that: each individual post in any (Discourse) thread whatsoever always arrives as its own email

What can I say? It works for me:

Screenshot 2022-10-31 1110241092×202 19.6 KB

Are you maybe looking for some sort of digest mode?

Quoted text also works for me:

Screenshot 2022-10-31 1112301362×613 40.8 KB

Maybe the difference is what Discourse is sending in HTML and non-HTML emails?

o_andras · 2022-10-31T13:05:14.860Z

Well, that’s great for you then!

SomeoneElse:

Are you maybe looking for some sort of digest mode?

I don’t think so. At least I don’t remember seeing anything of the sort in the settings.

SomeoneElse:

Maybe the difference is what Discourse is sending in HTML and non-HTML emails?

Yeah, the problem is with text email for sure.

nukeador · 2022-11-02T18:12:25.298Z

I’ve moved some of the replies talking about how to use the forums by email to this existing topic.