Enable “Start thread by email“ for more categories?

AIUI, currently one can start new threads by email here, for the General category onluy.

Can we get some more categories enabled please? :slightly_smiling_face::pleading_face:

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Sure, which categories do you want it enabled?

Note that it will be consulted with each category moderators to get their approval first.

Cheers.

At least all the “help-and-support” ones for me for starters, but probably many others too.

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Help and support already has new topics by email as described in

Also Tagging help & support

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How do users find out about that?

If I go to https://community.openstreetmap.org/ I can see a link to https://community.openstreetmap.org/c/help-and-support/7/none, but if I search that page for “about the” nothing is found.

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Those are sticky topics at the top of each category, which are then un-sticked per-user once you read them (unless you change this in your user preferences).

Frankly, that behaviour will be entirely unexpected to 99.99% of users. Help needs to be available to users when they need it, not appearing once and then impossible to find again. What documentation have we got that will allow people to find it?

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Maybe the behavior can be improved, but for everyone, once you get into the Help and support category that information is the first think you will see:

Once it’s disappeared for someone, how do they get it back?

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You can click on the
image

To pin it again, or go to your Preferences - Interface and disable this behavior for every pinned topic:

Automatically unpin topics when I reach the bottom.

Can we make this the default? This is surely what everyone will be expecting.

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I’m glad to see others already supported. Sorry for not knowing. I would have suggested those 2 categories. Perhaps the imports category? And the OSMF one?

Or can we turn it in all for all? All categories allow reply via email, why not new thread by email?

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Why you read about it on the OSM Wiki page about how to start a new Discourse thread via email.

The wiki only lists general, which is why I asked originally.

I’ve enabled it for Foundation but if I’m not mistaken import is a tag and can’t have an email in configured.

Initially this was avoided to be able to see if there was any side-effects. @Firefishy what do you think from a technical point of view?

I don’t mind if being turned on for all categories, as long as it doesn’t add a large extra burden.

I wish this extension was better supported: GitHub - mozilla/discourse-expose-emails-in: Discourse plugin which exposes category emails-in in useful ways

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We intend to enable this globally, but need to script it because it has to be done by-category.

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