It seems like we may now introduce sub-directories under English for Writer, Calc etc

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#4

@anon87010807: no offence intended, We are faced with a new learning curve in Discourse.

AskBot used in the site previous version made a clear distinction between comments and solutions (answers). We need this discipline here too. The links under the question allow explicitly to chose between “answer” and “comment” significance. However, I feel that “answer” may be taken too literally by newcomers used to forums where posts are ordered chronologically.

I don’t know whether “answers” are sorted chronologically or are weighted according to their marks (upvotes). So we should probably think twice when choosing betwen “answer” and “comment”.

Probably the links should be reworded as “Solution” and “Comment/Discussion”.

@Mike Kaganski: what do you think of this proposal?

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"Reply" button is needed for *comments*
#5

Probably the links should be reworded as “Solution” and “Comment/Discussion”.

I agree that “Solution” would be a better wording.

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#6

@ajlittoz: How is that related to the matter of directories? I referred to the OpenOffice forums not because I think that the forum model would be better here, but simply because of it has a directory structure that may be very useful here as well. We can benefit from the time spent at that forum to configure the subdirectories here.

The matter of comments and answers is very different. We know from experience that the model of moderating the forum by users (i.e. users upvoting helpful posts) barely works. Many people who come to ask a question, can’t be bothered to read the Read me first, they mistake the ask site for a forum, and don’t know how to tell the difference between a comment and a solution. In fact, they are playing a game without knowing the rules of the game and therefore don’t respect them. You know what happens then. Years ago, Hagar Delest of the AOO forum warned all volunteers for the Eternal September, and he was right. Don’t throw in niceties that the overwhelming majority of visitors won’t even notice.

#7

@anon87010807: Alas, you are right on all points.

Wrt to directory structure, of course any inspiration model is welcome.

#8

Answers are sorted by number of votes.

#9

@erAck: this was the case under AskBot. Do you mean it is still the case in Discourse?

#11

Yes it is.
(and the comments seem to be sorted in an unpredictable order…).

#12

Or by author?
[and have a damned 20 character minimum for posting hence this senseless remark]

#13

I also agree that “Solution” would be a better wording.

#14

This is now set to 10 :slight_smile:

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#15

They do, on an edited post appears a pencil icon and left of the icon is the number of edits, and if you hover the mouse over the icon it tells post last edited on … If you click on the icon you also get a diff view of what has been changed.

#16

@erAck: My comment about edits not showing referred to the AOO forum, not to this one. On the AOO forum, you don’t get a warning that a post has been edited. I have been active on the Ask board for a few years, I know more or less how it worked, and i noticed that you get updates about edited posts. That was, in fact, one of its best features. The downside was that the delivery of e-mail notifications of new posts or edits were, how shall I put it, not very reliable.

#18

Predictable, but confusing and arguably buggy. (This post also purposefully adds more nesting to this thread to check whether the fix works.)

#19

One question is what to do with topics with several such tags. With AskBot each question had to be tagged with at least one tag among common ‘writer’, ‘calc’, ‘impress’, ‘base’, ‘draw’, ‘math’ and/or ‘meta’, and the migration preserved that behavior. We have the option to force new topics have a single such tag now, but I count 3787(!) existing topics with ≥2 mandatory tags, e.g., How do i copy text without changing the formate? . What to do with these?

A downside of using subcategories in lieu of tags for LO components is that it’ll probably make asking questions by email infeasible in practice. This is not a regression since our AskBot instance didn’t have that feature (nor the ability to reply by email), but right now each category has a dedicated email address one can use to post questions. It’s fine as long we don’t have so many categories, but we probably can’t expect users to choose between these sub-categories addresses. That being said, not sure how useful that feature is :-). (Also not every category needs to have a dedicated incoming address for new questions, we could for instance enable it for ‘meta’ only.)

Whatever you decide, please save yourself the trouble of untagging and re-categorizing topics, this can be scripted and I can take care of that. :slight_smile:

#20
  1. Wrt questions having several mandatory tags: 3787 is in fact much less than I anticipated. It could be OK to keep them in the root directory; or to move to common, implying that those reflect problems affecting not a single module. IMO both would be acceptable (?).
  2. Wrt asking by email: and how do they tag their questions in that case? I suppose that would not be a useful feature. Questions (actually, answers) created in such a way would suffer from wrong quoting (put at the bottom, excessive, etc.)
#21

I may be wrong but I think it’s not possible to follow subcategories like it is possible in your own profile for categories and tags

#22

Ah right, the aim here was to use Discourse’s Watched Word feature to automatically tag new topics based on the content of its first post (the question), and reject the mail if no special keywords were found. But I don’t recall testing that with emails so can’t say whether it works…

AFAIK Discourse does some mangling to prettify emails replies, such as removing PGP/MIME attachments, quoted messages at the bottom of top posters, etc. Replies arriving by emails are publicly marked as such (like for GitLab and GitHub AFAIK) — you can see an example here and while the styling might be slightly different (greetings etc.) I find the mangling pretty good.

Having the ability to reply by email has been a long-requested feature of our AskBot instance and I’m really keen to keep it now that we have it and that people started using it :slight_smile:

#23

It’s fine IMO, as long as Discource does its magic reasonably well, as you describe. But answering would not suffer from sub-categories, right?

#24

No only new questions — and as said I’m not even sure that works well at the moment.

Don’t think people would miss the ability to be able to post new questions by email anyway: folks get email notifications and want to be able to hit the ”reply” button on the mail client to send a follow-up (for AskBot we indeed got a huge amount of replies to the noreply@ notification sender address), but for new questions the workflow is probably quite different. A middle-ground option would be to allow new topics to non-QnA categories only.

#25

Had a look on the default (test/stage) site at vm222 and that seems to work, the drop-down menus at /u/$USERNAME/preferences/categories (Watched / Tracked / Watching First Post / Muted) shows the listing à la find(1) (Depth First Traversal): There is one entry for “parent”, another for “parent child1”, another for “parent child2” etc. Seems clear even if other parent categories have sub-categories named alike.

Also AFAICT the parent category page /c/parent/$n includes posts in sub-categories as well (but not the pinned ones), see main - Discourse .

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