Hi @deeplow et al, thanks for all the work with the forum. Personally I prefer mailing lists, but the respective mode of discourse works really well. I would have however one little request / proposal if it is technically feasible: could we move the “[Qubes OS Community Forum] […]” to the end of the subject line?
Obviously these category tags “[]” are very helpful for filtering and I depend on them. However we have some that get very long like: “[Qubes OS Community Forum] [User Support/Testing 4.1]” or “[Qubes OS Community Forum] [User Support/Hardware Support]” … as a result the threaded view in the mail client becomes pretty useless.
I would caution against changing the default for all users, since having these tags at the beginning is a well-established standard. However, there could be an option (opt-in) for users to change these, e.g., shorten them, remove them completely, or move them to the end.
If any default change were to be made, it might be changing [Qubes OS Community Forum] to [Qubes Forum] just for the sake of practicality. (Even though the former more accurately matches the name of the forum, it’s quite long, and there’s minimal risk of confusion from shortening it.)
May I propose a poll? We could ask that only those vote who are actually using email to interface with the forum and use filters to parse the subject line. My guess is that that’s a pretty small crowd.
I did a bit of research and could not find any per-user customization for this. So I would be ok with the idea of changing the email prefix from [Qubes OS Community Forum] to [Qubes Forum].
I would say we should agree on that change first and if the issue persists, reevaluate our next options. In terms of filters breaking I think moving around the category title wouldn’t do much harm whereas this one would break the filters.
Changing the tag itself will break filters (we broke filters in the past by renaming categories). Also the change from [Qubes OS Community Forum] to [Qubes Forum] won’t buy us much. So I don’t think it’s worth it.
The problem here is the unknown: having the tags at the beginning is “established standard” and we don’t know what it will break unless we do the change. It could break filters, depending on how the filter is formulated “contains” vs. “begins with”.
I would still start by trying to get a feeling of how many users there actually are actively reading the forum in mailing list mode and asking them for their preference.
You’re totally right. And this is something I had not even realized at the time.
Ok.
I think we should see this as a usability blocker. People can’t actually see what the email discussion is about and I feel this should override any conventions. Additionally, as @Sven mentioned, this would likely not impact a lot of filters as they should filter with “in subject” rather than “beginning with”.
So I would be in favor as well of this. I can send out personal emails to everyone affected. But cannot move without mod consensus. @Plexus any thoughts on the subject?
The reason following conventions is important is that flouting them surprises users, and they find it weird and puzzling and a hassle to adapt existing workflows to the outlier. This isn’t a hard and fast rule, just a generalization. For example, if I’m subscribed to 10 forums via email, and 9 of them say the name of the forum at the start of the subject line, then the one that doesn’t would annoy me. Why does it have to be so weird? Just go with what works, I’d think.
How do most forums handle this? Maybe they don’t include the entire category hierarchy in the subject line. One option is to remove those and only keep the forum tag in the subject.
Yes, I think the goal would not be to remove the forum tag. Perhaps just shorten it as you suggested.
I haven’t investigated how other forums do this. But on the mentioned discussion there were some suggestions of moving the category tag to the end. I would also be fine with your suggestion of having it removed entirely, keeping only a short forum tag [Qubes Forum] in the subject line.
I don’t know about “most”, but I also follow the Whonix forum and there it has never bothered me. The difference there is that the tags in general are shorter and I haven’t observed much nesting of categories like here.
However, shortening the tags and flattening out the hierarchy would affect all forum users, not only the ones using mailing list mode. I think it’s a minor annoyance if we make the change though and it would preserve the standard.
Hum. I think flattening it out is disproportional. And not really something we should consider unless we realize there is en masse user confusion here.
Unfortunately there was little reaction (good or bad) to my renaming proposal. But that is honestly also my second choice.
Instinctively I give @adw’s concerns a lot of weight, because of his experience and contributions. On the other hand I can’t really see any scenario where moving the tags to the end of the subject line would harm (other then maybe a filter that can easily be fixed). It would clean up the mail UX a lot as @tasket pointed out and make it better for those of us interacting mostly by email.
Since the forum is still quite young it might also be acceptable to still tweak things a little. Could we maybe give the original request a try and see what happens? If it really causes issues, we could reverse easily … right?
A compromise could also be to have the subject line look like this:
[Qubes Forum] My important question (User Support/Hardware)
