When the proposal was made to have Discourse replace ye olde Mailman, Python was cited more than once as having gone before us.
I have recently subscribed to Python’s Discourse - mailing list style. Though the volume of mail is on the high side, I find it much easier to scan through the mails and find those that may have my interest and might be worth reading.
I think a lot of that comes from the fact that the forum structure is rather flat, relying mainly on categories and using tags sparingly to further distinguish certain sub-categories. On Fedora’s Discourse it seems to be the other way around: lots of tags and only a handful of categories. Thus, I’m not sure if what I’m about to propose is feasible and/or helpful on our Discourse. Anyway, here goes nothing.
The Python folks include the category in every e-mail notification. An example:
[Py] [Ideas] Make pathlib extensible
Here Ideas is the name of the category the messages was posted into. In that regard categories are treated as separate entities, like separate mailing lists. It’s easy to distinguish categories even if all messages end up in the same folder. It’s also very easy, without having to dig through headers and tuning filters, to get those delivered in different sub folders.
Could we have something like that in Fedora’s Discourse please[1]?
I realize that we would need to use tags in our case as things stand now. But maybe, I know I’m asking a lot, it’s also an opportunity to rethink our setup. As one person trying to follow both, ye olde mailing list as well as Discourse, from within my inbox, I find the mail I’m getting from Discourse of little help in determining what I want to spent my precious time on.
Also worth noting, Python does not add Re: e-mail style headers to the mails it sends. It’s all very clean and easy to follow, unlike Fedora relying entirely on the subject chosen by the OP, with tag information hidden in the meta data (aka headers).
pretty please with sugar on top
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