Using Discourse when being used to the devel mailing lists: common misunderstandings, issues, and HowTos to solve them

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Common issue 1: categories and tags

Categories are “News and Announcements”, “Ask Fedora”, “Project Discussion” (relevant for folks of the devel mailing list), “Water Cooler”, “Site Help & Feedback”, “Our Neighbors”.

Categories each have their own tags. Tags in “Project Discussion” are emphasizing the “groups” of people which they represent: e.g., workstation-wg , engineering , marketing-team , infrastructure-team
Upstream elaboration of categories and tags: It’s Time We Talked About Tags

Common issue 2: there is devel and development and engineering - what to subscribe to?

For people from the devel mailing list, the actual tag is engineering , whereas devel is just a forwarding to this tag (if you use devel, it will regularly be replaced by engineering). So both is ok and results in the equal outcome. This tag is in the category “Project Discussion”.

The tag development is intended for the “ask fedora” category, and intended mostly for developers who are not involved with Fedora, but develop their own stuff and ask us how to get something done. It is NOT intended for Fedora devel discussion, and subscribing to “ask fedora” categories can cause a lot of noise as some of them are intensively used by Fedora users.

Common issue 3: How to decide what I get emails about and what not (= subscribing to categories and/or tags)?

There is one page for every user, in which all that is presented at first glance and the user can modify: there are short elaborations contained about what means what, and experimenting what suggestions are allowed in what field (and what is allowed to be added where) might save time compared to read dozens of Docs pages.

Please replace the term username with your actual username, and then use the following link:
https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/u/username/preferences/tracking

The above mentioned upstream page about categories and tags is useful for this too.

Keep in mind that you can respond to all emails just like in a mailing list! The result will end up as a post in Discourse, and spread to others the same way as if you posted on the website.

Relevant might be also your “email” settings in Discourse. Again, replace username with your username: https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/u/username/preferences/emails → there you can decide in what situations Discourse sends emails and what is contained in the emails (these are yet generic options).

For more detailed information about how to adjust the configuration of email notifications and responses, you can review the Guide to interacting with this site by email.

Common issue 4: How to distinguish personal messages that are private and public discussions when I get Discourse emails?

If someone writes you a Personal Message that is not public, the email subject will always end with [PM].

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F46 Change Proposal: Changes Discussion Only On Devel List
F46 Change Proposal: Changes Discussion Only On Devel List
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Maybe also worth mentioning the guide Matthew wrote couple of years ago

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Good point. Added :classic_smiley:

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Personally I am thinking we should remove “devel” as a tag. Or at least stop suggesting it everywhere.

It was created to highlight the “same as devel mailing list” type of content with the idea that it would simplify the migration, but it seems it created more confusion in the end.

It is still not the same as mailing list and I think it is better to embrace the differences and make people check the tags and categories in Discourse, rather than pretend that nothing happens.

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Yes, indeed. To be honest, I wasn’t even aware devel is just a forwarding until the issue came up and I tested it 2 days ago.

But only site admins can delete tags in Project Discussion, which leads to the old problem. Also, afaik, there is a special group for the privilege of changing tags in PD category, and even most site admins are not contained. So they would need to add themselves, which means they need to work themselves into the case. It feels trivial, but it is again one of the cases in which without a dedicated (or documented) site administration, it’s not (… intentionally poking :innocent: …)

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For the record and to evaluate if we want to add this, Stephen just mentioned an issue that I have heard from others before and that seems to “hit” people used to mailing lists regularly:

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For another item which will probably confuse people. I know how to ‘respond’ to someone via email on these threads, but I have no idea how to start a thread via email if that is even possible. [If it is, then it would need to be added to the list.]

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It’s possible, but disabled here. You can set it to allow posts sent to
a specific address, but such incoming posts don’t have any tags
associated with them and would probibly not appear anywhere without
them, so you would have to login to the web interface to add tags
anyhow.

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I mentioned that in my “compromise suggestion” as unresolved issue, as I guess this remains a major issue or people used to mailing lists and I could imagine this breaks some people’s workflows.

I wonder if it is worth to consider to enable this, if a discourse-centered compromise could be identified that is fine for every side, may it be mine or another one. Not sure if that could be done even category-specific (?)

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I’m wonder about the possibility of spammer abuse.
How does this authenticate the user?

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I just tackled this in my update #1 to the compromise suggestion:

I cannot say for sure, but I would expect its possible that not every email can open a topic but only those known to the system. So people with FAS account.

I expect that there is one issue / minor limitation: people need to log at least once into Discourse in order to create their FAS account also in the system of Discourse. Once their Discourse account is created through the FAS system’s login, the email should be known to Discourse too.

I have never worked with this, but would expect its possible to limit email addresses to “members”…

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It seems it can be done per group and also per category

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Another post I found and that contains something I heard before from several engineers, maybe worth a point above, although I wonder if it gets too much if we are not careful:

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Yeah, the three problems I see:

  1. spam. I am 100% sure spammers will start using it.

  2. discoverability. We would have to update docs/etc with it, it’s not
    likely to be a very memorable address, people would have to know about
    it.

  3. no tags. You would have to go in and tag it after posting at which
    point you are already in the web interface, so why not just post there?

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I’m not sure if an engineering category or whatever it would be called would need tags → tags separated from categories is what I got regularly from engineers as one of the things they find confusing in our discourse. One reason why I made the “category compromise”. The mailing list doesn’t have it too.

Concerning the spam, you mean its not possible to limit this to email addresses that have an FAS account / Discourse? In the compromise suggestion I expected the latter, assuming the limitation that people need to log into discourse at least once to have their account created there. But I would wonder if that would just process every email from any address? (Have no experience with it of course so I was just guessing)

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I’m not sure if an engineering category or whatever it would be called would need tags → tags separated from categories is what I got regularly from engineers as one of the things they find confusing in our discourse. One reason why I made the “category compromise”. The mailing list doesn’t have it too.

Sure, but it could be confusing if the email isn’t going to specific
enough category.

Concerning the spam, you mean its not possible to limit this to email addresses that have an FAS account / Discourse? In the compromise suggestion I expected the latter, assuming the limitation that people need to log into discourse at least once to have their account created there. But I would wonder if that would just process every email from any address? (Have no experience with it of course so I was just guessing)

There’s no way I could see that working… it’s trivial to forge emails,
and we have a… lot of accounts, so checking it could be non trivial.

Anyhow, I think this is mostly a corner case we shouldn’t really focus
on…

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I wonder how other communities solve it - in Python, Ansible, Mozilla, GNOME..

It can’t be just our problem, and looking at How do I use Discourse via email? - FAQs - Mozilla Discourse or Email use of discourse - how to start a new thread - #4 by jakedane - Site Feedback - GNOME Discourse it seems that they have posts by email enabled in some way.

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