Heya! Answers in-line, but I wanted to put a quick summary here for folks in a hurry. Most, if not all, of these questions are *technical* in nature - they are things we can alter, either by existing settings, or by altering the Discourse code. I see this as similar to our Redmine instance - we've taken a FOSS tool and customized it to our needs, both via code changes and plugins.
More generally, though, your post reads as a direct comparison to a mailing list, and as I said in my opening post, I don't think a mailing list is right for us anymore. I'm not trying to mislead on this point. The mailing list mode that Discourse offers *is* different, yes, so a direct comparision is likely to find flaws. The real question is whether the *other* things it does are worth the cost. I know (from our chat on the dev list) that you don't agree with my conclusions about our needs as a community, so we're going to end up differing on whether it's worthwhile. If we migrate, then some "getting used to" is going to be needed, for sure. A balance of tweaks vs change-acceptance will no doubt be found, some of which I expect to be altered *after* we migrate. We don't have to set *everything* in stone on day 1 (and that flexibility is one of the things I like). Some things may be possible to do per-user, which is even better (again, flexibility to interact with the community as each user wants to). OK, specific answers: On 21/11/17 15:09, Lukas Zapletal wrote: > 1) Edits are not propagated to e-mail only users, I edited a post > andnever got an e-mail about this. > 5) Email response is slow, I know there is some polling, but this is > simply limiting and web users are inadvantage as they see the > content earlier. There is no polling now, that was temporary. Inbound email is instantly visible in the UI. Outbound email is delayed 5 min so that people have a chance to spot typos, missed links etc in their posts (in the UI ofc) before the emails are sent. I really don't think 5 minutes is a big deal, a quick scan of our lists suggests average response time is Order(hours) - to claim it's a disadvantage seems a bit of a jump. It seems an acceptable tradeoff to get allow posts to be correct when sent in the first place, cutting down on "oops, forgot the link" style followups. As for editing, there is a limit on the length of time you can edit your posts, currently that seems to default to 60 days (seems too high to me, for sure). I guess we could set it to the same 5 mins as above, so that no editing can be done after mails are sent, if this is a significant concern for people. > 2) It seems you can't reply to yourself via email, this often > happens if you need to correct yourself. This needs some context for those following along, and it's actually a security thing. This only happens when you reply to yourself by hitting "Reply" to the mail in your Sent folder. In this case you'll be sending a second mail to "[email protected]" instead of "reply+{token}@community.theforeman.org", which by default will create a new thread. I say "by default" because there *is* a setting to allow this, but the consequence is that it then allows sender-spoofing to occur. Discourse sends a different reply token to every user, so your reply-to address is different to mine even for the same post, and Discourse requires the "From" header to match the token. Unless you have my token, you can't spoof-post things pretending to be me. We can disable this, but that means sender spoofing is then possible. Details at [1]. So, we could enable this setting, but there are also other workarounds - enabling "Send me my own posts" in mailing list mode will mean you have something to reply to with a token (albeit after 5 minutes), and moderators can also merge split threads back together in the UI. As such, I'm inclined to leave it as it is, but we can flip that setting if it becomes a problem. > 3) All emails contain huge button to visit the thread I see you're already asking about this upstream :) Templates are editable, yes. That said, they seem fine in my client [2], pretty much the same 3 lines Google Groups adds. Would love to see what other plaintext readers get. > 4) Does not support text/plain emails, Again [2], plaintext in Thunderbird seems OK here. The plaintext version is the raw markdown from the post, which has some quirks, admittedly - I've opened [3] to discuss options there - but largely I've been getting nice emails from it. Could be MUA specific (I am reminded of the quote that there are no good mail readers, only some that suck less than others :P). > Now, on a different topic, with possible migration we will likely > loose 3rd party archives. I have no idea if it was deliberate action by someone (wasn't me), but I saw that Nabble has already created an account on our instance [4]. Not sure where that ends up yet, though, will investigate. As you say, it's entirely solvable. I've added it to the Draft Migration Plan so it's not forgotten. > Then, you showed how easy is to import content into Discourse, but I > would like to read something about what is the plan if this whole > project fails. This is a good example of where the phrase "roll-back" doesn't really work, but rather "roll-forward" is the right term. If at some later time we decide we don't like Discourse, we'll plan a new migration with the same care that we're planning this one. With regard to the data, there are rake tasks to export whole categories, and every post is in the DB. The mbox format is not complex and neither is the DB - I am certain we can handle getting every post out into a suitable format. As a backstop, we'll also have the archives on Nabble or wherever that ends up. With so many copies of the data, I think it's not too big a concern (no more difficult than it was to get the data out of Google Groups, certainly). I also think we wouldn't go back to Google groups, but move on to something where we could keep using the community.theforeman.org domain - this means email users don't have to update addressbooks. > And lastly, I see lukas_zapletal1 accounts, I was likely posting > under same name but different emails into the list. Is there some > kind of merge? Correct, the importer doesn't know those different email addresses are the same person. Yes, they can be merged, and I've tested it, but only once we stop importing the latest list posts regularly (the importer recreates the users while scanning the archive). I'll be happy to take a list of such duplicates and merge them if/when we migrate. Cheers, Greg [1] https://meta.discourse.org/t/reply-own-mail-creates-new-topic/74519 [2] https://imgur.com/a/Moe5l [3] https://meta.discourse.org/t/plaintext-and-or-raw-emails-for-mailing-list-mode/74267 [4] https://community.theforeman.org/admin/users/2186/nabble -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Foreman users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/foreman-users. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
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