Re: [Evolution] Oh for heavens sake ....

[Paul Smith <paul mad-scientist net>]

On Fri, 2022-10-21 at 21:26 +0200, Ralf Mardorf via evolution-list
wrote:
> As long as nobody succeeded, there is nobody who can help other to
> replicate success. It's at least my {,mis}understanding that nobody
> succeeded.

I overwhelmed by all the email about this topic and just deleted it
all.

You can count me in the category of people who have zero use for web
forums of any type and Discourse is in that category as well.

However I was able to get it to work, without too much effort, using
the example method linked in the announcement (the Gimp example).

I signed up (I used my actual email address to create an account, I
didn't link it to any other online account).

I clicked "all tags" and typed in "evolution" to find Evolution
messages. You can also scroll down in the "tags" list to find it.

Then I clicked the little bell icon on the upper right (next to "New
Topic") and switched the status to "Watching".

Then I went to my Preferences (under the upper right user icon),
"Emails", and changed "Email me when I am quoted, <...>" to "always".

I disabled everything below that ("Activity Summary" and "Mailing list
mode"). My understanding is you really DO NOT want to enable "Mailing
list mode" because it will send you an email for every post to the
Discourse system.

I then got busy and ignored it for a day. Maybe that helped me avoid
odd wait time errors etc. :)

This morning I noticed that I had a bunch of email from Discourse RE
Evolution. I was able to reply to one of those emails, and I see it
showed up OK including quoting etc. I have no idea what my "level" is,
or how to find it: I've not spent any time on the web site. Since I
don't go there, I also don't care about silly things like badges or
whatever.

The Discourse messages are being properly threaded from what I see, but
I haven't used it "in anger" enough to say there aren't some broken
thread issues here, somewhere.

I am having only these problems, already discussed here:

   1. I have no good way to sort email into folders like I used to
      because there are no email headers containing the tags that
      Discourse uses to sort messages.
   2. I have no idea how I can _reliably_ post new topics to the
      Discourse system and have them assigned the right tag, and hence
      get forwarded to other people who are watching the server using
      this method.
   3. Smaller annoyance: it really seems like Discourse batches up
      email and only sends it once an hour or something like that.  I
      could be wrong about this as I've not done any real experiments.
      If that's the case, that would also be frustrating.

These are definitely serious deficiencies in this new service, and I
hope that someone will find a way to address them.

But fundamentally it seems to work, in that I get email and I can
reply. So it meets the bare minimum definition of a "mailing list".