If you try to send an email to any of the above address without an account activated on VHSTalk you will get the following error message
We’re sorry, but your email message to [“space@talk.vanhack.ca”] (titled This is the subject line) didn’t work.There is no known account with this email address. Try sending from a different email address, or contact a staff member.
I have added in a 30 mins delay for “Mailing list people”
This has been done on purpose and you can talk to me about it on the forums.
Why are you wanting to make e-mail users second-class citizens? I don’t see any difference between the two methods of posting that justifies this. Both users are posting, why does the mechanism matter? If a primarily e-mail user decides they need to edit their post, they can come to the web interface and do so. This change will cause their replies to threads to often be out-of-context when they arrive and will necessitate e-mail users either constantly editing their posts to keep up with a discussion in motion, or forcing them onto the web interface to use the list effectively.
I thought the idea of this was to make the mailing list better for everyone, not worse for people that prefer “realtime” and push nature of e-mail.
If there must be a delay, 30 minutes seems like a rather long time. What’s the rationale for that period of time? If I don’t notice an error in my e-mail in the first minute or two after posting, I’m not going to.
(not @funvill, but have my own views on the matter)
I don’t see any difference between the two methods of posting that justifies this
Posts on the website are editable, once they’ve been emailed, it’s effectively frozen.
A delay gives some time for editing, locking a thread that’s going off the rails and driving people away, etc.
make the mailing list better for everyone, not worse for people that prefer “realtime” and push nature of e-mail.
There’s tradeoffs to any system. Mailing lists have their upsides (real-time) and downsides (flamefests that cause horrific member attrition…). No system will cater perfectly to everyone’s preferences.
VHS has issues with this in a bunch of ways- see the unmaintainable mess that is the current membership payment methods, created in the interests of catering to everyone’s personal demands.
Perhaps I’m misunderstanding the 30-minute delay. I took it to mean that inbound posts via e-mail won’t actually be visible (or broadcast) until the timer runs out. Not that notifications to e-mail are delayed. Which is it? Or Both? If the latter this seems more like a user preference (as there sort of seems to be already regarding digest format).
Isn’t one of the selling points of Discourse that threads can be muted, including to e-mail? It sounds like moderated (closed) threads would also have e-mail replies rejected, so it doesn’t really change the moderation equation. If someone goes out of their way to enable ‘mailing list mode’ I’m not sure I buy the argument that they will be bothered by the mail traffic. And if they are, and are willing to use the forum format, they can easily disable the e-mails. Not seeing the downside to fully enabling e-mail users here.
I mean yeah, you can’t retcon things out of existence for absolutely everyone, but as an e-mail user I am willing to accept that. I’m not really a fan of moderation that removes (non-abusive) things that have been posted anyway, regardless of how inane.
Also: I know the Mandrill situation is temporary, but if possible can the link-hijacking feature be turned off for the time being?
I hope that’s not how it works. I can’t see any benefit to that sort of behaviour.
Anyway, in IRC someone said the time was now set to zero and I’m finding the email gateway to be a little unreliable yet, (presumably Mandrill related) so it’s hard to even test the feature and figure out what it actually does. And as long as the number stays at zero, I’m happy to just ignore it.
The 30 minute delay is only how long it takes until it notifies the user that the post was created, I agree we should lower this amount. Incoming messages currently process within 5 min only because that is what the polling is configured for and this is scheduled to change in the next restart to poll every minute (the fastest they have right now)
Sorry what feature is that?
EDIT: I’m hoping to switch from Mandrill in the next couple of days.
I took it to mean that inbound posts via e-mail won’t actually be visible (or broadcast) until the timer runs out.
My understanding is that this is strictly an outbound thing - replies are immediately posted (however they come in), but email subscribers won’t have them pushed to them until $foo minutes. I don’t see a good reason to delay email posting, and I don’t think that’s what anyone else ment.
It doesn’t appear that this is a setting variable by user, at least at the moment- opting in to 0 delay would be a reasonable middle ground if it where. You might want to make a request of discourse?
There was a thread in the last few months that drove away 15 members. That seems utterly unacceptable, and I like @funvill’s thoughts on improving the situation. I think we try and be an inclusive community, and that seeing the last few months of the mailing list, it hasn’t done a good job of that.
Any link in the outbound e-mails via Mandrill gets rewritten to one of the form ‘http://mandrillapp.com/track/click/30299754’. I guess this is probably something that Mandrill offers as a ‘feature’ that can be disabled? I get tracked enough already…
If that’s the case, this doesn’t bother me that much, though I would prefer they be sent immediately.
Is there a page somewhere listing those emails to send directly to the forum?
It’s probably time to turn the “mailing list” page of the VHS wordpress site into a big FAQ about how this is the new hotness, mailing list is dead, how to use it (and how to use it like a mailing list)
