I feel like you are being intentionally obtuse here.
The reply to is the reply to; in the interests of reducing duplication it could be removed from the previous posts if it is also there. But it probably does not matter that much either way.
Remember the original use case is someone replies to post 10 out of a 49 post topic. Their reply is post 50. The idea is that you show them this
Yay, someone replied to you!
Post 50 text here
In Reply To Your Post
Post 10 text here
Previous Replies
Post 49 text here
Post 48 text here
Post 47 text here
Post 46 text here
Post 45 text here
I am just trying to nail down what this means and how it fits in to email context user setting:
Yay, someone replied to you!
Post 50 text here
###In Reply To Your Post
Post 48 text here (is it truncated to some sane length? you wrote this after all, so I guess yes. 500 chars or less, cause you just need a taste of it you know vaguely what you wrote)
###Previous Replies
Post 49 text here
??? post 48 duplicated ???
Post 47 text here
Post 46 text here
Post 45 text here
I think duplication here isn’t too bad. Though keep in mind there are no post numbers so if you didn’t include it, you wouldn’t notice it wasn’t there. Not sure if it would be confusing or not. My bet is most everyone wouldn’t notice or care since it was above the previous replies.
Y’all are on the right track here; this is great to see. We get a ton of complaints about the lack of proper threading in the “previous replies”. It’s got to be obvious to the reader what the current notification is replying to, since inline replies aren’t possible.
OK, so I’ve read through your replies etc, I think we have the following (wording suggestions welcome!):
User option: Make email notifications include context:
Always - include previous replies to a post you’re notified about, regardless of if you’ve received a notification of it
Auto [default] - include previous replies to a post you’re notified about, only if you’ve never received a notification of it
Never - never include previous replies to a post you’re notified about, whether you’ve been notified about it or not
Behaviour:
New post:
[Always] show the new post, the post they’ve replied to (if not the first post), as well as the latest n replies in the thread
[Auto] show the new post, the post they’ve replied to (if not the first post), as well as up to n of the latest replies in the thread if you haven’t already had them
[Never] only show the new post, and the post they’ve replied to (if not the first post).
Reply to your post:
[Always] show your post, the reply you’re being notified about, as well as the latest n replies in the thread
[Auto] show your post, the reply you’re being notified about, and include up to n of the latest replies in the thread if you haven’t already had them
[Never] show your post, and the reply you’re being notified about
Mentioned/Quoted:
[Always] show the post you’ve been mentioned/quoted in, as well as the last n replies in the thread
[Auto] show the post you’ve been mentioned/quoted in, as well as up to n of the latest replies in the thread if you haven’t already had them
[Never] show the post you’ve been mentioned/quoted in.
If mailing list mode is on:
[Always] behaves as above, always including the context
[Auto] turns off the context for new posts in a thread, but includes a replied-to post if not the first post
[Never] includes no context, not even a replied-to post.
Layout-wise:
Replied-to post if appropriate
The post you’re being notified about
The rest of the context as above
Alternatively, should the top two be swapped around?:
Whoops, forgot some bits… in addition to my post above:
if a post has been used in the first two steps, it won’t be included again in other context beneath it.
N = the site setting for context
@downey yeah I think it flows better, plus, you only want to read the replied-to post if you can’t remember what it was about, the first thing (at least, in my opinion) should be the new content.
90% of the time it won’t make much sense, but there are several cases, one being if the notification is being sent on an old thread - it could be anything from days to weeks old. To display the context as chosen by the user is important here, I feel. If they don’t want the context because they’ve got it in other emails, they can easily set it to ‘never’.
Re quoted, good point. If quoted, assume the relevant context has been included.
You are adding complexity here, I don’t think this is needed. Historical stuff is always fudgy in mailing list mode. However adding anything besides the actual body of the post in mailing list mode is like mixing water and oil, no mailing list does this, its orthogonal to mailing list designs.
But this is exactly the scenario that my users are asking for, to have context included when they use mailing list mode. They want to see what post something was in reply to. FWIW, I don’t agree with it, but if that’s what they want, then I think we should certainly consider it. What do other forums’ users think?
I think the options outlined above in the mailing list mode scenario fit this quite well.
At a bare minimum they want to see the immediate parent message to the notification. This is perfectly in line with most mailing list usage, because people can do inline quotes with “regular” mailing lists. Since that’s not possible with Discourse email use cases (for now) this is the only way I can see to provide that context.
Ah yes, good point. That’s the main reason why the users of my forum are pushing for context - because we can’t quote in emails, they need to see the message that was being replied to.
Trouble is, the quoting issue is hard because I think that’s what is used, in part, to determine what the “new” message contains.
I do have a concern here we are changing behavior of “context auto” . In the past “In Reply To” was not displayed so in mailing list mode you would not get that at all, post the change described every reply you get we will be inserting the “In Reply To” which forces people using mailing list to go to profile and change that setting.
I know people like @avdi who use mailing list mode pretty exclusively would get a bit of a surprise here. I guess the fix is a 2 second change from the user side.
Anyway we can discuss this ad-nauseum better just build something. Start with the drop down box, and make it work exactly the same for mailing list mode and non mailing list mode.
Any updates on the thinking here? We are about ready to migrate our 1500-member developer mailing list to Discourse. We already know the notifications are confusing to them. But, if notifications are going to change dramatically soon, I will try to hold off to introduce less pain.
Hi @downey - not much of an update from me, I’ve been swamped with stuff unfortunately. I’ve made a start on it, but not enough to start committing yet really. I do have a bit of free time this weekend which may help, but it’s still probably going to be a while till it’s committed, reviewed, and accepted.
