The discussion is about the wording of the “Visit Message” link in Discourse email footers. scottfsmith finds the current text confusing, as it appears to suggest responding to oneself. codinghorror initially disagrees, but danekhollas clarifies the issue, pointing out that the recipient’s own username is included in the list of participants, making the text sound awkward. codinghorror explains that the current wording is intended to emphasize that the response will only be visible to the participants, but danekhollas suggests a simpler alternative. scottfsmith proposes a revised wording that includes the phrase “to respond to this discussion with %{participants}.”
The text for
user_notifications.visit_link_to_respond_pm
is now set by default to
[Visit Message](%{base_url}%{url}) to respond to %{participants}.
but most PMs are between two users so it appears as e.g.
Reading this as a sentence it sounds like I am Steve333 being offered to respond to scottfsmith thanks to how it parses (which is backwards as I am scottfsmith, not Steve333). It looks like it used to just be ... to respond, it was lengthened at some point.
Sorry, this looks just fine to me. What is it exactly that you are reporting, or proposing? There’s also no way this is a bug, which would prevent normal use of Discourse.
I think what he meant is that the PM recipient list in the footer contains the username of the email recipient himself.
Right, but what is “wrong” with that? Seems entirely correct. We’re trying to show that the reply will only go to those people. It is not a public reply, visible to everyone (or on private sites, visible to all logged in users).
Yeah, it just reads weird cause it’s literally telling you to respond to yourself. 
i.e. if I had a PM with you, it would be better if it simply said
Visit message to respond to codinghorror
To me that does not properly communicate that only those two users (including yourself) will see the response.
We actively want some redundancy here because people complained (many times, actually) that they were not clear that their email response was going to a PM (and only to those specific users, too) versus a public reply, etc.
Got it.
It seems that the current wording was introduced here:
Before that, the list was on a separate line which was even more obvious in my mind:
Participants: xx,yy
Maybe in your mind, but not mine. Bit of a bikeshed discussion..
I agree its bordering on bikeshedding here, but it did catch me off guard when I read it and I first thought it was a bug. How about
[Visit Message](%{base_url}%{url}) to respond to this discussion with %{participants}.
