How close Discourse can be to a good ML (for those who want it)?

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…

1 Like

Edit notifications. It would be nice to have an email notification with the new text if a post has been edited — does this happen?

It doesn’t… or at least I didn’t receive an email with your edit.

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…

Good example of mail awfully gone wrong (though not for quotes): the one Discourse sent for this message: its plain-text version looks like this for the first point:

        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\.

The text/html version is nicer, but if discourse only supports text/html why even send a text/plain mime part? might as well be honest and say it supports only HTML, so that clients use their preferred way of rendering those instead of getting this kind of plaintext.

Best thing would be to make discourse itself handle it, but, as you say… sounds unlikely to actually happen.

I think that Discourse has a pretty big motivation to provide a nice mailing list experience because they would like to be able to tell communities they can give up their mailing list software with a smooth transition. I recommend bringing these issues up on the Meta Discourse.

I think that Discourse has a pretty big motivation to provide a nice mailing list experience because they would like to be able to tell communities they can give up their mailing list software with a smooth transition. I recommend bringing these issues up on the Meta Discourse.

Do you also mean that you do not know any knob to turn (on either instance-moderator or user side) for any of these issues, and that you find their current existence unlikely?

(i.e. am I writing a support request or a feature request)

Yes, that’s what I meant, but I didn’t look very hard. (A feature request.) I just looked through the email settings and some of them seemed relevant.

Maybe relevant to quoting:


Would setting that to zero help?

Email subjects can be customized:

Preferring incoming HTML email:
image

Disallow replies after a certain time period:

Context is very unlikely to help with inline quotes.

By the way, images in plain text of emails are also in bbCode and that’s useless.

I would expect that preferring HTML will make things worse: incoming plain-text-only emails will still get horribly mangled, and sometimes some formatting like font name will get through needlessly.

What we should be able to do: could someone please set the logo to SVG with 1x1 pre-scaling size? Or maybe 32x32. I would expect any remotely relevant browser that can display images and run scripts to succeed in scaling such an SVG, and no-script Firefox would not wonder what to do with a maximum-z-order huge image.

(Maybe logo’s z-order should indeed be lower than all active UI elements, but that is probably a question for upstream)

Re: email address — it looks like using a signature with mailto: is the least crazy solution with the current state of the Discourse.

…and Discourse explicitly refuses to provide edit notifications: https://meta.discourse.org/t/email-notification-for-edited-posts-in-mailing-list-mode/16931/12

Pity.

well i had heard of discourse
but really dont know much about it … so after some research :cloud_with_lightning:

i found they say :
#discourse/discourse
0)

A platform for community discussion.
Free, open,
simple.

0.1)

discussion platform built for the next decade of the Internet.
Use it as a:
mailing list
discussion forum
long-form chat room

discourse#requirements

Discourse is built for the next 10 years of the Internet, so
our requirements are high:

Browsers Tablets Phones
Safari 6.1+ iPad 3+ iOS 8+
Google Chrome 32+ Android 4.3+ Android 4.3+
Internet Explorer 11+
Firefox 27+

Anyone wishing to contribute to the github.com/discourse/discourse project must read & sign our Contributor License Agreement .

if i read this and the discourse#requirements
i get a bit of different picture about the motivation they have

also the idea of replacing any mailing list with discourse to me appear absurd

the “simple” & “high requirements” software
aka “best viewed with JavaScript enabled”

:sweat_smile::joy::rofl::crazy_face:

i mean i can script scrape a topic history archive
of links and tags

u=“https://discourse.nixos.org/latest?no_definitions=true&no_subcategories=false&page=#0-21
curl “$u”“0” | ect

but in my mind the whole point of mailing list was archives

MotherFunking offline archives Old Man Yells at Cloud

give me plain text or give me EOL
:wink:

Indeed, reading meta.discourse.org leaves an impression that Discourse is explicitly not willing to implement some of the features necessary to be usable as a mailing list.

https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/96aca20fd7143f050549da2d0257e696a17a1656/CONTRIBUTING.md#contributing-to-discourse
Discourse CLA

I like their honesty, though. "Give us all your work for free." And I used to think that FSF's copyright transfer agreement was a bit too much...

…and Discourse explicitly refuses to provide edit notifications: https://meta.discourse.org/t/email-notification-for-edited-posts-in-mailing-list-mode/16931/12

Ugh.

Normally, our own discourse instance running our own fork can solve most of these problems, but given their CLA I don't think that's likely to happen without a large willing community that would support those patches, which contributors to nixpkgs, IMHO, are not (e.g. I like nix, but I'm not interested in maintaining web apps).

Meanwhile, GNU Mailman v3, which is a proper Mailing List, has HyperKitty (https://wiki.list.org/HyperKitty\), which is

the archiver project for the Mailman 3 suite, allowing users to browse mailing lists, start new threads and reply to existing threads, mark messages as favorite, search archives, and so on. It is a Django-based web application that aims to implement modern archiving. It can also run standalone, without the rest of the Mailman suite, to serve as a web forum. It was originally started by the Fedora community.

to repeat

It can also run standalone, without the rest of the Mailman suite, to serve as a web forum.

Just saying.

2 Likes

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/fosdem-talk-on-bootstrapping-in-guix

“Here’s a talk some people here may be interested in:” [link]

what happened to this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhopx8J2Z8s ???

or
someone didn’t feed discourse
so now it eating your fricking plain text links :scream:

try your self with

 lynx --dump https://discourse.nixos.org/t/fosdem-talk-on-bootstrapping-in-guix

same thing happen
if scripts are disabled #WTF :hear_no_evil::see_no_evil::speak_no_evil:


$ lynx --dump https://discourse.nixos.org/t/fosdem-talk-on-bootstrapping-in-guix
#[1]Nix community Search [2]RSS feed of ‘FOSDEM talk on bootstrapping
in guix’

[3]Nix community

[4]FOSDEM talk on bootstrapping in guix

[5]Links
__________________________________________________________________

[6]timokau 2019-02-22 22:10:58 UTC #1

Here’s a talk some people here may be interested in:

The recording quality isn’t amazing, but I think the content is
interesting. Its about reducing the size of the initial binaries needed
to bootstrap a system, ideally down to (nearly) 0. It looks like there
has been quite some progress.

Somewhat related discussion I started a while ago: [7]Meta attribute
for binary packages

more posts

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References

  1. https://discourse.nixos.org/opensearch.xml
  2. FOSDEM talk on bootstrapping in guix
  3. https://discourse.nixos.org/
  4. FOSDEM talk on bootstrapping in guix
  5. Links - NixOS Discourse
  6. Profile - timokau - NixOS Discourse
  7. Meta attribute for binary packages
  8. Profile - clacke - NixOS Discourse
  9. GNU Mes 0.19 released — joyofsource.com
  10. Profile - vcunat - NixOS Discourse
  11. Profile - timokau - NixOS Discourse
  12. Profile - clacke - NixOS Discourse
  13. Profile - clacke - NixOS Discourse
  14. http://bootstrappable.org/projects/mes.html
  15. LIBRANET.de | clacke: inhibited exhausted pixie dream boy 🇸🇪🇭🇰💙💛 @ LIBRANET.de
  16. Profile - clacke - NixOS Discourse
  17. GitHub - edolstra/nixpkgs at mes-stdenv-bootstrap
  18. GitHub - edolstra/nixpkgs at mes-stdenv-bootstrap
  19. jannekeⓋ🌱: "@clacke@libranet.de yes, it's in eelco's mes-stde…" - the Octodon
  20. jannekeⓋ🌱: "@clacke@libranet.de yes, it's in eelco's mes-stde…" - the Octodon
  21. https://discourse.nixos.org/
  22. NixOS Discourse - NixOS community forum
  23. FAQ - NixOS Discourse
  24. Terms of Service - NixOS Discourse
  25. Privacy - NixOS Discourse
  26. https://www.discourse.org/

:roll_eyes:
so it appears
“Powered by [26]Discourse, best viewed with JavaScript enabled”

:giraffe: could be read as :clown_face:

“infomation Silowed by [26]Discourse, some links un-viewable with JavaScript disabled”


ugh : “Github link was replaced with a permanent link”