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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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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