On Wed, 5 Aug 2020 at 00:12, Oscar Benjamin oscar.j.benjamin@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, 4 Aug 2020 at 23:03, Brett Cannon brett@python.org wrote:
On Thu, Jul 30, 2020 at 8:41 AM Wes Turner wes.turner@gmail.com wrote:
I confess that I don't even know how to subscribe to all threads of a discourse.
- [ ] How to subscribe to all threads of discourse
Go to the category you care about, e.g. https://discuss.python.org/c/packaging/14, and if you look in the right side next to "+ New Topic" you will see a bell. you can click that and choose to what level you want to follow new topics (only new threads, notification of all comments, direct notification of all comments, etc.).
What I haven't quite got my head around is: what exactly is the "workflow" with discourse if you are a regular follower/contributor on some forum?
Do people who use it a lot begin by going to the forum website?
This is what I do, personally. For me, the email integration sucks, so I turned it off completely. I set the "Latest" view as my default view, visit the site regularly (I have it as a second tab alongside my gmail tab) and click on any topics showing as having new content. I suppress any categories that I don't want to see (like "Users").
It's not very sophisticated, but my usage of email isn't that sophisticated either :-)
Do they get the email notifications and interact via those?
No, as I say I find the emails pretty bad, so I don't use them at all.
I've been working with discourse in the latter mode and from that perspective it seems inferior. If the expectation is that I have to begin by going to the website then that changes my fundamental approach. Right now I subscribe to many mailing lists and they all route to an IMAP folder. When I feel like browsing them I can go in and skim messages from a wide variety of mailing lists.
I initially found having to use 2 sites (gmail and Discourse) a nuisance. Now, it's a minor inconvenience.
The other process seems to be that I begin by choosing to go to the discourse forum website in order to look at messages in a particular forum that I actively choose to look at at that particular time. If that's the case then I would inevitably end up following fewer mailing lists/forums since each one requires a momentary active decision from me to read that particular list. I can imagine that that might reduce the wider participation that is a big part of the purpose of these lists. Maybe other people would be more likely to follow things that way but I certainly wouldn't.
That's certainly a valid concern. I only really use Discourse for the one "list", the packaging list (I see others, but they are low traffic - as I said, I hide "Users", which may be high-traffic, I don't know). I've expressed my concern that I think Discourse could scale badly if it became high traffic in multiple categories, but at the moment it feels to me like mostly Packaging-related with a bit of other content, and I can cope with that.
Paul