Email subject prefixes

When I turn on emails for every post their subject look to be of the form "[elastic discuss] [$forum] $topic". This makes them very difficult to scan on mobile because the things in square brackets take up most of the screen. I'd prefer not to have either of them or just the forum name one.

It's totally possible for us to customize these settings.

I guess I'd want to tease it out a bit more, though.

Does the forum name really matter to you if you see the topic in brackets? I would automatically know that it came from the Elastic forums if I saw subject prefix e.g. [Logstash] for items in the Logstash category. Maybe that's my own naiveté since I work at Elastic, though.

Some other thoughts:

  • It seems to me that the forum name, [Elastic Dicuss] is pretty useless in terms of information when scanning subject lines.
  • This prefix does nothing special for our users who want to filter items sent to the forums; all mails from the forum are sent by noreply [at] discuss [dot] elastic [dot] co, so users can easily filter on that email address.
  • I feel like topic is useful because it tells me quickly I can skip a particular thread, e.g. I don't care about Elasticsearch topics right now but I do want to read everything about Logstash today.
  • I agree that the forum topic in the subject line of the email is useful.

I wonder if the nice Discourse humans have thought about making these setting configurable on a per user basis. Would be a pretty darn sweet feature. I'll see if its come up anywhere.

I agree with you on the forum name - I'd prefer you just remove it. I'll figure out what [Logstash] means. I expect the "In your native tongue" ones won't come out well without the [Elastic Discuss] prefix.

+1

We have removed "[Elastic Discuss]" from all email subject lines. So your email subject lines should now look like "[$category] $topic" instead of "[Elastic Discuss] [$category] $topic".

We've also renamed the "In Your Native Tongue" category to "Elastic In Your Native Tongue". So your email subject lines for this particular category should now look like "[Elastic In Your Native Tongue] $topic" instead of "[Elastic Discuss] [In Your Native Tongue] $topic".

Thanks!

I just wanted to type that but the software says I have to type 20 characters. I suspect I'll be thanking people fewer times from here on our.

LOL. Thanking people is a Good Thing™ and we definitely want to encourage it! So I've reduced the minimum post length to 5 characters (at least one word, most of the time).

Hello.

Even if it has shrank the subject line a little bit, it still annoyingly long. For example, each french post if prefixed by
[Elastic In Your Native Tongue/Discussions en français] when we used to have just [elasticsearch-fr] before.

Isn't it possible to have a setting for that? Putting only the last category (Discussion en français) and not the full path should be sufficient (at least in that case).

Thanks.

Maybe a short alias for the prefixes?