[Koha-bugs] [Bug 34315] Provide an alternative to the mailing lists - Discourse

[bugzilla-daemon at bugs.koha-community.org]

https://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=34315

--- Comment #10 from Thomas Dukleth <td-koha-bugs at agogme.com> ---
[Correcting myself.]

There is a Discourse option for setting the minimum trust level of users for
creating a topic by email.  Unfortunately, the option is ambiguously named and
easy to mistake for a more general function of having Discourse receive email. 
Yet, the option exists and is easy to reduce from default trust level 2 to
trust level 0 matching replying by email to an existing topic and allowing
people who work more efficiently using email to do so without unnecessary
extended use of inefficient forum software.

[There is much hardcoded behaviour from the developers at Civilized Discourse
Construction Set, the company which controls Discourse, who often do not
understand why anyone would prefer otherwise but creating new topics by email
does have an option for setting the minimum trust level instead of the default
trust level 2 value.  Lack of formal documentation beyond the most basic level
for installation is problematic.  Most of what passes for documentation is
either the code [upon which I have needed to rely too much]; the user
interface; or very brief explanations of some narrow subtopic often in answer
to a specific question buried in https://meta.discourse.org .]

The ambiguously named options for email_in* are distinct from reply_by_email*
despite "reply by email" needing to be received as "email in" the Discourse
instance in order to function.  Perhaps the ambiguity in naming is an artefact
of historical development order.

Replying by email depends upon a token which incorporates both the topic and
the user sending the reply.

Creating a new topic by sending an email message depends on the special email
address for the category in which the topic [email subject] would go. 
Categories might be very broad such as devel, translate, etc. and use tags for
faceted discovery.  There is no provision for assigning tags to a topic in
Discourse from sending an email message but tags beyond list name are generally
not a feature of exchanging mailing list email even if that could be useful. 
[Using the forum software for tag assignment also helps avoid proliferation of
tag names from misspellings and unnecessary different names if users avoid such
with autocompletion in tag assignment.]  

email_in:
(Allow users to post new topics via email.  After enabling this setting, you
will be able to configure incoming email addresses for groups and categories.)

email_in_min_trust:
(The minimum trust level a user needs to have to be allowed to post new topics
via email.)

reply_by_email_enabled:
(Enable replying to topics via email)

To my knowledge, there is no reply_by_email_min_trust option.  Replying to an
existing topic is considered to have less need for trust in Discourse which is
either enabled for all users of for none and seems to be hard coded at trust
level 0 if enabled which is fine.  The trust level for posting a new topic is
considered more concerning for spam abuse.

There are better ways of controlling spam than restricting users from doing
most of what people need to do for communicating regularly on mailing lists. 
The developers at Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, approach spam control
by having very little restriction for spammers to create an account but
excessive restrictions for anyone to contribute usefully.  Reducing the
likelihood that spammers would have be approved to obtain an account is better
than deleting spam which could have been avoided.  Spam in topic creation is
likely to be much more obvious and thus stopped quickly and especially when
created for email can be reduced by email spam checks more easily than topic
reply spam because the email subject header is used for topic creation.  Spam
control for email before it would even be available to Discourse can make email
submission the least likely to be the source to Discourse post spam but
enabling email spam control requires configuration for incoming mail the
opposite of recommendation in Discourse.

There are other defaults which need to be changed for email compatibility in
Discourse to be meaningful without being forced to use the forum software for
an extended period.  Here, I have merely corrected my error about the presence
of an option and identified the difficulty of default choices to which many
Discourse users have objected.  There are also problematic hard coded issues
which we do not have for email_in_min_trust. 

(In reply to Thomas Dukleth from comment #9)

[...]

> Living up to the promise of email
> compatibility will require either modifying a hard coded design, creating
> some plugin to do so, or constantly running a script to elevate everyone to
> trust level 2 merely to allow known users to use email for posting with
> their own topic as opposed to merely answering about topics raised by others
> without being forced to use the forum software for an extended period.

-- 
You are receiving this mail because:
You are watching all bug changes.