Re: Testing Discourse for Debian - Moderation concepts
On Wed, 2020-04-15 at 11:21 +0100, Neil McGovern wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 15, 2020 at 11:08:45AM +0200, Martin wrote:
> > On 2020-04-15 08:56, Neil McGovern wrote:
> > > Could I point out that the email program you wrote this message
> > > in is
> > > doing the same?
> >
> > Could you elaborate on that? Ansgar seems to use
> > "User-Agent: Evolution 3.36.1-1"
> > (While I'm using mutt.) How do such UAs track reading behaviour?
>
> Evolution tracks how long you've looked at a message in order to mark it
> read. This is configurable in Preferences -> Mail Preferences -> Mark
> messages read after X seconds. My point is that one cannot simply say
> "user tracking is bad", as it may be required for actual functionality.
> User tracking is also known as "saving state" :)
I'm not concerned about marking messages read after some time and
keeping the view time in ephermal storage for that. But that's not
what Discourse does: as described elsewhere it stores all read times
persistently on the server; that would not be neccessary for marking
posts as read even on a web application.
I feel it dishonest to compare storing data persistently in a database
and evaluating it for statistical purposes (or other analytics that
people come up with to increase participation and measure community
engagement for community building) with keeping data in ephermal
storage for a short while.
Evolution also keep track of the mouse cursor, but that is something
different from recording clickstreams and evaluating them to increase
user participation as some people do. Your reply seems to put both on
the same level.
> > > Quoting does work in most circumstances. Could you explain what
> > > additional funtionality is missing?
> >
> > Speeking for myself, I find the email support in Discourse poor,
> > to the point, that I would not advertise it. It is useful for
> > notifications, but by far not en par with the web UI.
>
> Interestingly, I've generally mixed replying via email with visiting
> the
> site. I would agree that it's not en par with the web UI, but I don't
> think it ever can be, due to email being designed rather differently.
>From my tries with Discourse, it just silently stripped all quotes out
from the reply.
> > After reading more about Discourses many features ("likes"...),
> > this is completely understandable that one cannot mimic one
> > medium via the other. Trying so, will lead only to frustration.
>
> Just on this one, you can a little. Replying with a +1 will turn your
> email into a "like". Currently supported actions are:
> * +1 or like: likes the post
> * watch: watches the topic
> * track: tracks the topic
> * mute: mutes the topic
Is this documented in some discoverable place or hidden? I've still not
managed to discover any documentation for Discourse targeting the user
(compared to admin or API documentation).
Ansgar
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