Apply "mailing list mode" per category

feature
9

I think this deserves a little more thought and consideration.

With some hand holding, I’ve been able to convert forum skeptics to switch to using the UI rather than treating Discourse as an awkward mailing list server. But it’s taken time and explanation. Here are a few of the places I’ve seen confusion with these users:

  1. mailing list mode is now too noisy for most users
    when we first launched, the core participants shared a lot of their interests in common. As we’ve grown, most users care more about different subsections of the forum than others. Mailing list mode used to work fine for them, but now they have to mute categories in combination with it, or turn it off and watch categories instead.
  2. “watching” and “tracking” do not apply when in mailing list mode, but “mute” does
    It’s not obvious which of these noise-level settings interact with mailing list mode and which don’t.
  3. when you watch or mute categories, then the forum becomes less usable for these users
    many of these users passively consume the forum via email, but then interact through the UI when they see something interesting or want to respond. email was effective at keeping them engaged and drawing them back to the site while at the same time keeping them generally informed about topics they care about.
    now, they can mute other categories, but they would prefer to not have these completely hidden from latest when they are drawn to the UI.
    or, they can instead turn off mailing list mode and only watch the categories they want to watch. but then when they visit the site, they have piles of notifications for things they’ve already been emailed about.

I’m also very sympathetic to the fact that the notifications are already complex and the suggestion in this topic could make that problem worse (which is a similar criticism to this other idea).

I also appreciate that some other thought is going into the layout of the preferences page.

I’ll think about this more and see whether I come up with any thoughts about what might be done to improve things so users are are not only able to choose preferences that make sense for them, but are likely to do so without hand-holding.

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