I dunno @DeanMarkTaylor all I feel you did there is normalize it to GMail’s button style, which will depend which mail client one is using, etc.
There’s been some discussion about this in private emails, from people who get paid a lot of money to be UX experts, for whatever that’s worth.
I’ll summarize:
gray is a poor choice for a hyperlink. I actually thought there wasn’t a link to the topic, when this is the most important place for me to go… is this default, or our custom?
“Too noisy” means there isn’t a clear call to action. What is the most important call?
Links in the content don’t need to be bold and link colored. The name doesn’t either. The link to the content, in order to encourage conversation, is the key CTA and as such deserves the strongest visibility.
Why is it bad to make people only look at the simple most important link in the email?
The related change is that it used to read like this:
To respond, visit http://discourse.example.com/t/blah-blah-title
Which is indeed a bigger target, still grey though, but a giant-ass, fully spelled out grey hyperlink. So we changed it to
To respond visit the topic.
I definitely agree that we need to make the primary call to action clear in the email. Particularly since these are responses directly to you, in some form (quoted you, mentioned you, replied to your post), not just random posts we’re alerting you about.
I don’t think it’s that terribly different than this:
What’s the primary call to action there? The email should normalize on Discourse’s button style, not GMail’s button style. Heck if anything we should add the reply arrow glyph, too…