Hello,
I just found I don’t know which e-mail address to send to if I want to start a new thread. So, I’m forced to write this using the Web interface.
Also, I found that the last message I received from Scala Users was nine days ago, and since then it stopped sending me messages, and I have no idea, why.
Best, OliverHi
Discourse seems to support starting new topics by e-mail, @heather.miller / @jvican what do you think about enabling it? (https://users.scala-lang.org/admin/site_settings/category/email, it’s called “email in”).
About missing notifications, I saw the same thing. In fact I received a number of emails just now, but 18 hours after they were posted. I think this is not the first time that email delays are showing up. Maybe @jvican / @Fabien has an idea?
Lukas
The reason why you received them is because we fixed some issues with the Docker instances misbehaving after a Discourse upgrade. We restarted Docker and email got back to normal.
Discourse seems to support starting new topics by e-mail, @heather.miller / @jvican what do you think about enabling it? (https://users.scala-lang.org/admin/site_settings/category/email, it’s called “email in”).
I’m not sure about this, I see value in reply via email, but starting topics via email could bring a lot of bad-formatted posts (since they usually contain logs, machine info, etc). I would prefer that people come to the interface first, and this could help also removing deduplication, since they could check if there’s a related question in the forums before posting it.
Hello,
If you are struggling to keep Discourse running, wouldn’t it make a whole
lot of sense to switch to something that does not require heavy
maintenance, like, for example, uhm, Google Groups? Seriously?
I was told switching to Discourse is not a loss, because it can work just
like a mailing list. Now I’m told that we should not start threads by
e-mail, because Discourse really sucks at being a mailing list. It can’t
even preserve the formatting of an e-mail. What an embarrassment.
I’m not at all concerned about people posting the same questions over and
over again. So what, let them. It’s easy enough to search the archive of a
Google Group, and those who don’t do that, won’t do it with Discourse,
either. I’m much more concerned that people will turn away because the user
forum is a disaster.
Best, OliverI love your sense of positivity!
Oh, we’re definitely not suffering to maintain the discourse instances. It’s just that we found out that we have to restart the Docker images after every update because the autoinstaller doesn’t seem to do it for us yet. I think this is the only problem we’ve run into since we use Discourse as our official forum.
And it can! We’re only discussing here if one concrete feature of the mailing list mode should be enabled or not. I’ve personally listed my reasons for not doing so, you’re invited to elaborate on yours, since it’s not clear to me how you would tackle the duplication problem.
Do we agree that it’s better if issues and their discussions are self-contained and concentrated in one place? This way, people can easily keep track of who said what and where, and users experiencing the same problem only need to read one thread, instead of several.
It seems to be quite on the contrary, though! I’m happy with Discourse – for some reason, we’ve experienced an increase in number of posts since we opened the instances! This, I believe, is increasing our userbase.
If you would like your voice to be heard, you can come to Scala Contributors to discuss why we chose Discourse over any other platform! This is the pertinent thread: Let's close this Discourse instance - Meta Discourse - Scala Contributors. It was already settled and the Scala Center team and the Scala team provided all the reasons for the switch. Lots of people are positive about the change, so I’m taking this as a succes. It’s not perfect, yes, but experience tells us it’s a better alternative to Google Groups. You can also reach out to us in our Scala Center gitter channel.
Have a good day Olivier,
Hello,
I just wrote a longer response, and when I tried to post it, I got this
response from Discourse:
We’re sorry, but your email message to [“scalausersdiscourse+
[email protected]”] (titled Re: [Scala Users]
[Meta] No messages / where to mail to) didn’t work.
Reason:
Sorry, new users can only put 2 links in a post.
If you can correct the problem, please try again.
Best, OliverOh wow, this is disfortunate. I was not aware of this restriction, I’ve bumped it to 10 links. This is part of the spamming protection built-in into Discourse.
Let me know if you have further issues posting your reply!
Please let’s not police each other
Please, the most important thing is that there be as minimum possible barrier to participation as possible.
IMO one of the important problems we have is that the mailing list and forum are not representative enough of the scala world. Most of the participants are enthusiasts, and while that’s normal and to be expected, if we want to solve the issues that are preventing scala from being more popular, we need to have as much visibility as possible, and the way to do that is to make the barrier to participating as small as possible.
Relative to when? That’s not my perception… although recently we haven’t been having many posts at all.
Also, I haven’t been getting messages a lot either.
Look, I got there are things that aren’t or weren’t ironed out yet. But that’s why I said a different time, that it’s silly to try to make the move atomic. Let whoever likes google groups use it, at least for now. Let whoever likes Discourse use it. After a few months if all the complaints are resolved, then you can begin phasing it out. Although I’d prefer to let it be, and just if desired actively discourage people from using it. (E.g. put a message in the emali footer and in the web welcome banner that “highly recommends” discourse.)
It’s always easier to predict the future once it has arrived. 
I’m sorry if this came across as policing – that’s not my intention behind this comment.
My comment tried to highlight, in a nice way, a trait of the last post that made me think more than twice whether I should spend some minutes of my day replying to this thread. I finally did because I don’t believe that my perception of Olivier’s comment corresponded with his original motivation to write it, but I wanted to point it out.
Maybe I’m wrong, but in my view to police is to tell people what to do. I’m not sure I do – my comment is a personal appreciation.
Relative to the frequency of mails in last year’s mailing lists.
It depends on how you define “a lot”. But I’ve seen a substantial increase in my inbox since the migration to Discourse! 
What’s the motivation of it? What’s the problem we want to solve?
I don’t have to predict the future, I can look at the data of the present!
Well, a year ago we had 67 threads in scala-user in a one-month period. We’re at about half that in Discourse. I don’t think we can claim victory in activity here. (The month before the Discourse stuff was announced, there were 47 threads in a one-month period.) It’s just too early to tell–there’s always an extra boost of activity when there’s something new, but then there is also always a lag in adoption.
If you add Discourse plus scala-user for the past 24 days, you get 48 messages, for a total of about 60 threads per month, which is comparable activity to a year ago. Discourse has overtaken scala-user, but we can’t tell whether it’s because it’s better or because we announced scala-user was going to be discontinued because both the “it’s here” and “old one’s going away” announcements happened at the same time.
If you add SIP/SPP related stuff–well, that’s not fair because that’s new activity that needs to be supported by something. It’s higher then, of course, but it would have boosted any medium we used to talk about it.
Anyway, bottom line, I don’t think there’s adequate support for either a “sky is falling” or “sound the trumpets of victory” stance. (That the sky is not falling is worth noting!)
Hello,
Thanks for raising the limit on links. It would have been awkward for me,
because my signature already contains three links.
Sorry if my messages sound negative, but I do feel strongly against the
switch from Google Groups to Discourse.
Best, OliverHey @Ichoran, thanks for sharing your data.
I have some data to back up my claims in Scala Contributors, not Scala Users. I’ll pass it to you in Gitter to avoid going off-topic here.
Hello Olivier, thanks for the apologies, but they are not necessary. Would enabling the option to start a thread via email make you feel better about this platform?
If so, I’m happy to enable it, even though I was a little bit reluctant on the effect that would have with duplicated posts. My best interest is that all users alike feel as much comfortable as possible, and you’re no less.
Hello,
For easy access by new people, there should be an e-mail address to open
new threads, and it should be easy to find it for any one. Thanks!
Best, OliverHello Olivier,
I have just enabled it. I think you have to send new emails here: [email protected].
Let’s see if it works, it’s the first time we use it.
Hello,
Doesn’t seem to work:
"We’re sorry, but your email message to [“[email protected]”]
(titled Test: New Thread by E-Mail) didn’t work.
None of the destination email addresses are recognized. Please make sure
that you are sending to the correct email address provided by staff."
Best, OliverI’m creating a guide to explain how to do it, I’ll pin it in the forum.
I’ll post it here when I have it ready.
Hello,
Sorry, guide to do what? To send an e-mail? Why would you need a guide for
that?
Best, OliverHey Olivier, I’ll write a small guide to know the endpoints that you need to email.
Discourse sets up some endpoints to which you mail, and then Discourse automatically categorizes it. This means that if you want to send a mail that is categorized as a question, you mail to [email protected]. That endpoint changes from category to category. Therefore, incoming emails have a category per design.
As this approach is not common, I need to explain it in a couple of paragraphs.
Jorge Vicente Cantero wrote:
[jvican] jvican http://users.scala-lang.org/u/jvican
April 11Hello Olivier,
I have just enabled it. I think you have to send new emails here: [email protected].
Why can’t that e-mail address for that and the return address that appears in
e-mailed list messages be the same e-mail address (as it is for normal mailing lists)?
Daniel