Difficulty interacting with Discourse as a new user via email

[pocock (Daniel Pocock)]

I recently went to a large free software event where I met a wonderful community and had a great time.

Afterwards, I tried to follow up on some discussions by posting some resources to the community’s mailing list. From there I was redirected to a Discourse site which they had recently set up. Most settings were still in their default state.

I copied my emails from the mailing list over to new topics on the site and encountered a range of problems:

• one of the messages sent via the email interface has never appeared yet, with no feedback either, leaving me with a lack of confidence in the Discourse concept
• another attempt to submit an email resulted in a reply by email “Your account does not have the required trust level to post new topics to this email address. If you believe this is an error, contact a staff member.”
• the first time I copied an email from the old mailing list to Discourse via the web interface, I spent a few minutes adapting all the links that I had cited into the Discourse markup. When I tried to submit the post, like a nasty little dictator, Discourse replied that it doesn’t like more than 2 links in a post. I think this is the default from site_settings.yml newuser_max_links
• when I tried to copy the next message from the mailing list, Discourse again became a dictator telling me that I have to wait 1 minute before I could submit it.
• trying to copy another message from the mailing list, Discourse complained that it didn’t like the URL in the link (there was only one link in this message)
• after all that, a big nasty message appeared telling me “Your post was flagged as spam: the community feels it is an advertisement, something that is overly promotional in nature instead of being useful or relevant to the topic as expected.”

I understand there are spammers out there, but

• the free software community should not risk insulting and wasting the time of legitimate volunteers and contributors as these are real people
• site admins who successfully ran a Mailman list may not expect their users to be treated so badly by the default configuration
• a user who has previously participated in other online communities through mailing lists and then uses Discourse for the first time and encounters all of these rules will be particularly irked by it
• censorship is, in principle, wrong and has a corrosive effect on communities. If you imagine two communities, run running Mailman and the other running a censored platform for a period of 3 years, which one will have more contributors and more diversity of ideas at the end of that period?
• most of these restrictions are just security theater anyway. E.g. the a spammer may be quite happy only posting 1 link. Some spammers are simply happy to have their brand name appearing in subject lines, with no links at all. Spammers are paid to work around these things but volunteers lose valuable time trying to change their writing style to get under the radar of this censorship.

I’d like to share a few constructive suggestions in the hope that Discourse can treat people with more respect:

• never tell the user they might be a spammer, just tell them the message is being held for moderation
• don’t give the users orders, e.g. telling them to wait or telling them to modify their messages to remove links or whatever, just put the message into the moderation queue and let the moderator give personal feedback if the message is far outside his expectations
• use other default methods, such as a captcha or moderation of the first post, to filter out spammers. Once the user has crossed that one-time hurdle, let people contribute freely without imposing on them.
• the ability for other community members to mark a message as spam is dangerous as different people have different definitions of spam and it can have an anti-social impact. It is better to send somebody a polite personal message telling them why their content is off-topic rather than an anonymous insult. If people mark a message as spam, then at the very minimum make them give a reason and show these reasons to the poster.
• tell people at the sign-up screen that their first post will be moderated, so they don’t lose time writing a message and then get taken by surprise by this policy.
• think about it like joining a Mailman list: if the effort for the user or moderator on Discourse is more than it would have been in Mailman, then the user who used mailing lists before is going to feel like they are taking a step backwards and may be disappointed by their first impression of Discourse and the community that is using it.

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

@pocock

never tell the user they might be a spammer, just tell them the message is being held for moderation

I am fine with that, @codinghorror worth updating the copy there.

@pocock

don’t give the users orders, e.g. telling them to wait or telling them to modify their messages to remove links or whatever, just put the message into the moderation queue and let the moderator give personal feedback if the message is far outside his expectations

This would introduce more work for moderators, if a feature like this would have to be default off.

@pocock

use other default methods, such as a captcha or moderation of the first post, to filter out spammers. Once the user has crossed that one-time hurdle, let people contribute freely without imposing on them.

Just cause you can solve a captcha does not make you a non-spammer. There is already a one-time hurdle, see:

Understanding Discourse Trust Levels

Once you pass TL0 vast majority of the issues you raised are non existent. In fact, you passed TL0 on this very site already and can post all the links and images you want.

Rate limits will always be built in, otherwise a user can create an account and bot a forum out of existence extremely easily.

@pocock

the ability for other community members to mark a message as spam is dangerous as different people have different definitions of spam and it can have an anti-social impact. It is better to send somebody a polite personal message telling them why their content is off-topic rather than an anonymous insult. If people mark a message as spam, then at the very minimum make them give a reason and show these reasons to the poster.

Sure, go for it if you wish:

It is the default selection in that dialog.

Disable all flagging though is never going to happen by default out of the box. If you want that you are going to have to customize your site.

@pocock

tell people at the sign-up screen that their first post will be moderated, so they don’t lose time writing a message and then get taken by surprise by this policy.

We would if that was correct, but it is not correct, except in sites that have it enabled.

I completely agree that sites like https://discuss.reactjs.org/ that have this option on should do a better job at educating, but I doubt they even should have it enabled in the first place. Personally I hate when communities have “hold first post for moderation” enabled. It is user hostile and leaves a really bad taste.

@pocock

think about it like joining a Mailman list:

I did, and wrote about it here:

Simplified HTML emails

I think there is a huge divide here, which is why you are having trouble parsing this: On one side of the you have users who use “email” as a “trigger” to get them to visit forums. On the other side you have users who want to do the majority of interaction via email, they do not care that a forum exist, all the want is MAILMAN foreva ™ For the mailman users: They do not care about titles and avatars, email is enough, when they see all this duplication they have an internal fit. …

We are not mailman, we are a different beast.

Anyway… this is a very long post and hard to respond to all of it, but the gist is that as a person running the forum you could customize pretty much everything you described here. You could start users at trust level three, disable flagging, allow people to post anything any time, reduce rate limits and so on. But … as defaults … they do not make sense.

[pocock (Daniel Pocock)]

This would introduce more work for moderators, if a feature like this would have to be default off.

There is always going to be some work for leaders in a community, trying to automate their way out of it is delusional. Time spent helping new users is time well invested and if the community doesn’t have sufficient leaders or leaders with sufficient time to invest then they are going to have trouble growing.

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

@pocock

trying to automate their way out of it is delusional.

Wait, can you back this up with anything, or is this a Colbert gut moment.

[pocock (Daniel Pocock)]

Wait, can you back this up with anything, or is this a Colbert gut moment.

If you can code empathy maybe you could do away with leadership.

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

It is Friday, I need to get some work done, this can reopen next week if you must.