Re: Help

Thanks for the info. I'll give it a try.

-Gordon

On Tue, Aug 9, 2011 at 7:21 PM, Edward Reid <[email protected]> wrote:

> 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<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
>

-- 
Gordon Alley
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