Difficulty interacting with Discourse as a new user via email

[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.