The discussion revolves around the best practices for posting via email on a Discourse site. Fsantiago advertises the posting email address for a specific category on their site, but notes that this is not a common practice among other Discourse forums. pfaffman suggests that the email-to-category feature is often used in communities that previously relied on email-based mailing lists. Fsantiago and pfaffman further discuss this use case, highlighting its potential for importing mailing lists into Discourse. Alternatively, jomaxro notes that some sites use the email-in feature for automated reports, keeping the email address private by integrating it with other systems.
Hello discourse community. On my discourse site, in the category about topics, I advertise the posting email address for that category and mention it’s for trusted users above a certain level. I post the address as a png image rather than text to try to avoid spammers skimming it off my site with automated bots.
As I look around other discourse forums, I see no one else advertising post via email addresses. Is this feature typically used only by staff and not advertised?
Am I doing right? Best? Any opinions out there that can be offered to me? Thanks everyone.
It’s sort of a fringe use. I suspect it’s most often used in communities where people were already accustomed to posting by sending an email to a certain address.
I know a number of sites don’t advertise it, but use it in another system for automated reports. For example, users can “generate a bug report” from a game which is then emailed into Discourse using the email-in feature. This way the email is never revealed to anyone.