The discussion revolves around the desire to automatically strip email prefixes like “Fwd:” and “Re:” when creating new topics from incoming emails in Discourse. downey suggests this would improve readability and reduce manual cleanup. tobiaseigen questions the need for automation, suggesting manual editing is sufficient. lake54 supports automation to reduce admin workload. codinghorror raises technical concerns about regex complexity and localization. jeff_y notes that while users should follow email conventions, Discourse could handle the conversion, citing existing importers that already support this. JonathanShaw expects users to fail at this and believes Discourse should automate it. Lhc_fl proposes configurable settings for administrators to define which prefixes to strip and shares a plugin solution here.
As a user, I want to be able to forward an email message to Discourse to start a discussion, without having the topic include all the “FW:”, “Fwd:”, “RE:”, etc. cluttering up the topic line, so that it’s easier to read what the topic is without the useless email junk.
Saw this today when someone forwarded a message to start a discussion about a document he received. There was about 15 characters of junk that I ended up stripping out of the topic title.
Why not just edit the subject line before posting? Or go back later to clean up the post?
It’s something that could be done by Discourse automatically and reduce an admin’s workload (and keep things nice and tidy from the off)
Can you propose a regex here? This might be tricky with nested fwd: re: etc and how many variants? Also needs localization does it not?
Here’s a good start:
I think most people forwarding a message to the forum will follow email conventions, which include prepending "Fwd: " and "Re: " to forwards and replies. However, forum content uses a different convention of not including the prefixes. Therefore, I think the email receiver should do the conversion.
Some Discourse importers already support removing these prefixes:
I would definitely expect users to fail to do this, and I would have expected discourse to do it automatically.
I’ve been having some trouble with this lately. Maybe add some settings like this to the sitesettings to allow the administrator to set which prefixes should be stripped?
Okay, finally I solved my problem by writing my own plugin. I think this partially solves the problem in this topic
