Hello
Generally, I find that Discourse has some benefits as an ML with
elinks-readable archive over Google Groups and doesn't annoy me too much
by its behaviour.
However, maybe some things could be improved cheaply? (I am
using some of the good points @oxij has raised, but also adding my own
points and my own silliness, assume all good points are his and all bad
wording and bad points are mine; I put @oxij in Bcc because I don't want
to find out Cc: invokes Discourse functionality we never knew about).
Categories. I _hope_ this message to
nixos1+meta@discoursemail.com ends up in Meta. If it does, we should
advertise that functionality a bit, right now we advise to send to Inbox
only.
(EDIT: Yay, it works!)
Email address. Is there anything I can set in my profile to make
my email displayed, and displayed as an email? Maybe to logged-in users
only, maybe only to people who have already posted, whatever.
Trust levels — I don't know what are the local cutoffs for being
allowed out of novice level and post normally (higher trust levels are
probably useless to people who do not login…), I guess adding the
email-replied posts to the counters as «have read the message, have
entered a topic, have spent a minute reading» would be nice for better
ML-like experience. I think we don't have newcomers who reply without
reading messages anyway.
(From ambiguous signs I infer that one currently cannot earn
unlimited links in messages just by replying via email).
No-script experience: I have no idea how the theme is edited,
but if the snowflake is an SVG scaled by JavaScript, could its default
size be less than «cover entire page»? Text-mode browsing doesn't suffer
from that, obviously.
Private replies. I understand that as long as GMail's handling
of From: is unpredictable and DKIM implementations do random things, we
won't get proper ML behvaiour because Discourse wants to be careful. But
could I enable something to 1) allow PMs from co-subscribers of boards
via email in some way, 2) include that email target in some of the
address headers of Discourse messages from me? That could keep
«Discourse only mention its own email domains in headers»
anti-broken-anti-spam feature, while giving better email-client UX.
Exchanging real email addresses could then happen, if desired,
via PM or via «display email address» setting (if it actually exists) or
whatever.
Edit notifications. It would be nice to have an email
notification with the new text if a post has been edited — does this
happen?
Sane plaintext formatting of quotes would be nice, but I guess
this is easier to do via a script than via talking Discourse into not
breaking conventions…
could be read as 