Re: Switching to Discourse

On Thu, Jul 21, 2022 at 3:42 PM Steven Barker <[email protected]> wrote:

> So last night I tried activating mailing list mode [...]
>

To follow up on my own post, here's an update. I figured out that I'd done
something incorrectly the first time I tried muting certain categories of
posts on Discourse. I think I just failed to save my choices in the
settings screen, and I got it right the second time I tried. The firehose
was tamed to a reasonable rate of flow.

I do still think that experience is much worse than signing up for just the
python-dev mailing list. While excluding the Users (now Python Help), Ideas
and Packaging categories has cut out most of the stuff I don't care about,
there are a lot of low-volume categories that I probably don't care about
either, but I don't know enough about them to tell. I'd rather be able to
opt-in to categories I want instead of opting out to everything I don't
want. I have low confidence in my understanding of Discourse settings, but
I don't currently believe that setting a category as Watched does the same
thing as mailing list mode, for that category only, but I could be wrong
(I've not tried it). I don't want summary emails, and that seems to be the
only thing on offer. And there isn't a generalized Dev category that covers
the range of topics that the python-dev mailing list does.

So to give my final takeaway: It might be possible for Discourse to replace
Python-dev, even for those who wish to get their messages by email. But the
user experience of signing up is vastly worse, and will need much more than
a single paragraph in the dev-guide for most people to have a satisfying
experience with mailing list mode (or some other mode that I don't yet know
how to use).