Discourse initial reactions/issues

General
1

I’m just starting to use this new discourse system, and ran into a few bumps. The ones further down the list tend to be harder.

I’m also not sure if I should do a separate post for each issue.

  1. No description/credit for the discourse system itself. A quick search found https://www.discourse.org, but it would be nice to give credit and to have a link to help on the system readily available, e.g., in a page footer that said “powered by discourse” or something like that. The guidelines for this forum says"Check The Docs First" but those are documents on Stan, not the discourse system.

  2. The little tutorial robot after sign up never believed that I had entered an emoji. I suspect that’s because they’ve been disabled, but it’s not a smooth experience. BTW, I see they were disabled, but I’m not sure why.

  3. I signed on through google and then attempted to change my email address. stan/discourse sent a confirmation to the new address, but when I clicked on the link I got the message shown at the very end of this message (because of formatting problems). My address is back on the one I used at initial sign up. My google identities are a bit of a mess. My primary one is managed by stanfordalumni and does not have all google services available (in particular, no google groups). It has several associated email addresses, including the one I attempted to change to. I also have or had another google account that was a “regular” google account with all the services. I think that may be associated with my attempted new address as well.

  4. I kind of like email. Is there a way to receive lists posts via email? To post to the list via email? Most of the help I’ve seen suggests email is used only for spot notifications (mentions of my name, replies to my posts…). But the bottom of Discourse features | Discourse - Civilized Discussion, under Configure, lists mailing list support as the last item.

Error message for item 3 above:

There was an error changing your email address. Perhaps the address is already in use?

2

For the mailing list stuff, click your picture in the upper right and click the gear (to get to Preferences). There is an E-mail button at the left, click it, and you can enable “Mailing list mode” with an e-mail for every post (which is what you want I believe).

Dunno if you can respond via e-mail, but the e-mails have a link to go to the threads.

2 Likes
3

Well, not anymore. Despite the error message I got, the system shows my “new” email address as the one it is using, and my “old” email address received a notification that the address had been changed.

Thanks @bbbales2 for the tip. That looks like what I wanted, at least for receiving posts via email. It looks as if one can respond to individual posts by replying to the email; I don’t see anything about creating new topics via email.

4

Yes, you can configure it to use email. I’m not sure how to add categories, though. And you can’t use markdown—everything gets escaped. But then I have a love-hate relationship to markdown to begin with.

I used to like email, but our list took control of my email to the point where I’ve enjoyed having the distance to discourse as a web client.