A trial of Discourse for Plain Text Accounting discussions

I turned down a lot of the Discourse default chattiness, to be less jarring for the current mostly technical user base, but which emails did you find still bothersome ?

Late reply, but thanks for this. I believe I was thinking in general about Discourse forums, but realized Discourse’s email setup can be a bit more flexible than other platforms. For example, I personally ended up disabling the ‘activity summary’ thing for now (may consider turning it back on at a weekly or monthly basis later, daily is too much), and enabling “Email me when I am quoted, replied to, my @username is mentioned”

Perhaps I would suggest changing the default for summary emails to weekly.

Understood. The daily summary emails by default are a temporary thing while the site is in “bootstrap mode” - once it has enough users it switches to week summaries by default. I might do it sooner.

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Ok, I have changed the digest emails’ default frequency from daily to weekly (for everyone).

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I really like the use of Discourse as a replacement for Reddit. Never liked Reddit and always found it a bit cumbersome for many reasons. Several other forums I am part of have been using Discourse for some time now and everyone seems very happy with it.

The chats are nice for instant help but I find that I am a bit hesitant to ask simple questions that most likely been answered ten times before. And more complex discussions are always nice to learn from, something I think a forum of this type facilitate better.

Not a very tech savvy person, but I have been using PTA for a few years now, last year or so hledger, and hope to be able to contribute to the community in one way or another.

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Thanks, this is an aspect of chat rooms I’m now more aware of.

(The busy IRC rooms I’m familiar with do not seem to have this problem, the opposite if anything :rofl: )

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Related:

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As we are plain text accounting, why don't we use plain text forum? Would such technology exist?

Like a mail list ? Do you think it would get traction ?

There's Ledger, hledger, and Beancount mail lists (sleeping, sleeping, and lively respectively).

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In addition to what Simon said, there are a number of “traditional” type forum softwares still around, but a lot of the kids nowadays would probably find them “dated” (aesthetically).

I am an old school IRC and Emacs user, and am allergic to JS, “web 2.0”, progressive loading pages and all the rest of the “modern web” but even I don’t find Discourse too bad, especially considering alternatives.

As we are plain text accounting, why don't we use plain text
forum? Would such technology exist?

[... 3 lines elided]

I am an old school IRC and Emacs user, and am allergic to JS, “web
2.0”, progressive loading pages and all the rest of the “modern web”
but even I don’t find Discourse too bad, especially considering
alternatives.

You can use Discourse forum completely using email. I am interacting
with the Discourse forum here using mu4e inside emacs. Discourse makes
it work like a mailing list.

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