Re: Help

Quoting Gordon, but a couple of others expressed similar thoughts:
>Is there a way to subscribe (via e-mail) to all posts and responses in the
>support forum, so I can see people's
>complaints/problems/suggestions/solutions without having to browse the
>website every day? Seems like being forced to use the forum is a lot more
>work for me to keep up with what's going on with MD.

Yes, in fact there's a full email gateway. Once you sign up for the 
forum, you can go to your profile and set what you subscribe to. The 
terminology is slightly confusing because it says "notify" rather 
than "subscribe", but in fact you get complete posts, not just notifications.

I had forgotten about this because the only option I had set was to 
subscribe to thread I had posted in, and I learned quite a bit in the 
course of writing this reply. You can also subscribe to new 
discussions across the entire site -- I think this means only the 
initial post and if you want to subscribe to the thread without 
posting, you have to make one quick visit to the web site to 
subscribe. Most importantly, you can subscribe to every post in 
categories you select. The main thing missing is a button in the 
category (list of discussions) itself saying "subscribe". The lack of 
this button made it harder for me to figure out the subscriptions.

You may want to be careful about enabling all categories, especially 
Problems and Questions! It's hard to count posts, but I think I 
counted 76 in the past 24 hours. Obviously the posting traffic is far 
heavier than it ever was on this list!

You can also reply to the thread by email. Each message you receive 
will have a line that says "// Add your reply above here". Reply, and 
everything above that line will be posted as a new message in the 
forum. (So don't leave attributions or such above that line, because 
EVERYTHING above the line gets posted.) Or (better) you can simply 
remove the previous text and write an ordinary reply with no quoting. 
(If you try to reply quoting the entire previous message as is 
unfortunately common on this list, someone is likely to ask you to stop.)

Tender (the software used for the forum) uses an unusual markup 
scheme for a web forum, but there's a method to its madness: it works 
almost by default with email replies. Most importantly, a leading ">" 
on a line cues Tender to render the text indented -- IOW, as a quote, 
which of course is what the ">" signifies in email. And if you start 
each of several consecutive paragraphs with an asterisk (or any of 
several other commonly used characters), it gets rendered as an 
unordered list. There's also a less obvious markup for making URLs 
which appear online with text different from the URL, while in email 
the link and the text both appear.

You do have to go online to get help with the markup syntax, but 
someone could copy it into a text file. There's a "help with syntax" 
link at the bottom of the reply box, and complete documentation at 
http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax -- you can get 
there from the "Markdown" link at the same location but it takes a 
couple of clicks.

So it really is a fully featured email gateway, and you can 
participate only on the web, only by email or any combination.

So there you have it: I think the answer is positive for all those 
who expressed interest in continuing to follow discussions by email. 
Personally, I was so disgusted by GetSatisfaction that I didn't look 
at the MD forums for a long time, and only gradually realized that MD 
had chucked GetSatisfaction and switched to Tender. Tender isn't 
perfect, but I think MD made a good choice.

Edward