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

[guilhem]

@mikekaganski

how do they tag their questions in that case?

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…

@mikekaganski

Questions (actually, answers) created in such a way would suffer from wrong quoting (put at the bottom, excessive, etc.)

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

[mikekaganski]

@guilhem

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

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?

[guilhem]

@mikekaganski

But answering would not suffer from sub-categories, right?

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.

[guilhem]

@sophi

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

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 .