Remember that my concern is conditional on whether there is an established convention for emails from discussion forums, and – if there is one – what exactly that established convention is. If there might be a good reason that forums standardly do it a certain way, I think we should at least thoroughly understand what they do and why they do it before deciding to buck the trend. But this isn’t a huge deal, and maybe no one else will notice or care, so my concern is not a strenuous objection by any means.
I just spent and hour searching the web and I couldn’t find anything
approximating a convention or standard when it comes for forum
notification email subject lines. It appears the topic of this request
is not that unusual at all, especially with forums that have long names
(shorten name, tags at the end etc.)
My totally unscientific impression is that a majority of forums these
days run on discourse. Discourse itself in it’s documentation readily
embraces and supports changing the subject line format.
In the respective discussions I haven’t found anything about a standard
or convention. The discourse developers have paid attention to the mail
headers and made sure emails thread nicely in Thunderbird, Outlook,
Kmail and others.
Maybe the explanation is as simple as thinking in a tree structure. If
you look at a forum as a tree you would have the name as the root, the
categories as branches and the threads as leaves. So maybe it’s natural
to write it this way as a subject line … just like a path?
Thank you for researching that, @Sven! In that case, I don’t have any objection.
I do like your compromise solution, since it would help to avoid mistaking forum emails for personal emails (sent directly from one person to another), but most MUAs nowadays probably already have tools to help categorize those, so not a big deal.
It seems like a consensus is being reached.
@adw, which proposal in specific are you referring to? (Sorry, I didn’t get it):
Then I think we should move forward with this. Just to make it clear, this will affect every discourse user. Not just mailinglist mode subscribers. (For the better, I think)
Poll
Given the fact that it affects everyone and significantly increases the email usability, I think a poll at this point is not needed. Just more of a heads up to those users as they are the most likely to be using category filters.
Action Plan (proposal)
This is just a proposal. I can deal with implementing them. Just wanted to know if it’s a good plan of action.
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Change subject line to be in the form of:
[%{site_name}] %{optional_pm}%{topic_title}%{optional_cat} -
Notify email mailing list mode users about the filter change.
-
Add pinned post on Forum Feedback forum with notice about this change (unpin after 1 month)
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Sounds good to me, but out of curiosity, what is %{optional_pm}%?
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That’s the [PM] tag for when someone sends you a private messaege. It was already there.
The pinned topic announce this change is the following:
When implementing this I just had a minor issue which was that it didn’t include a space between the topic title and category:
[Qubes Forum] Email filters may break: forum emails subject changed[Feedback/Forum Feedback]
It is now fixed. But at least one batch of emails contained that mistake.
2 Likes
No complaints so far… And a way better email experience for everyone!
Thanks for bringing it up @sven!