The purpose of this topic is to provide information about the migration from FreewayTalk and Groups io to Discourse and the differences in Discourse, as well as a place to discuss the good or bad of the migration. For those previously subscribing as an email list, this will also provide details of how to change your preferences to get a similar experience.
Existing Posts
As part of the migration, all posts from FreewayTalk and Groups io have been imported and staged accounts have been created for those posts. What this means is that when you sign up on Discourse with the same email address used on the previous services, you will be reclaiming ownership of those posts. They will become associated with your new profile and any information you choose to add to it.
If you are unable to verify ownership of the email address the posts were originally made from, we will not be able to provide, change or remove any of the personal information associated with those posts.
Profile
During the migration, the only pieces of profile information imported to Discourse are your email address (this is private) and name. Depending on the name used on emails sent to the previous services, the name may not accurately reflect the latest name you used. You will be able to change this while signing up, however.
If you wish to reclaim your previous posts but use a different email address on Discourse, sign up using the original email address and then change your email address on your profile page afterwards.
Posting
With Discourse, it is not necessary to join a particular category in order to post to that category. While logged in, you will always be able to reply to topics or create topics in any category as long as they are not closed. Currently only some of the legacy categories are closed.
Posts with Unknown Account
Due to a bug in the FreewayTalk handling of emails, a small number of emails in the database did not contain the necessary information to match them with the correct account. These posts have all been consolidated under a single “Unknown User” account in Discourse and we will not be able to associate those posts with the original sender.
Use as a Mailing List
One important distinction is that Discourse is forum-first, the website will provide the best experience. That said, it does support receiving posts by email as well as posting and replying via email so it can provide a mailing list experience for those who prefer that. Note that there will be a 10 minutes delay after making a post before it will be delivered by email, allowing time for corrections or other edits.
If you wish to use this service as a mailing list, you may wish to disable email summaries if you haven’t already. Click your profile icon in the top right, followed by the little person icon and then Preferences. Navigate to Emails, then disable When I don’t visit here, send me an email summary of popular topics and replies.
On the same preferences page, you will also need to set Email me when I am quoted, replied to, my @username is mentioned, or when there is new activity in my watched categories, tags or topics to Always if you don’t want to miss emails while you are on the website.
To subscribe to receive emails, navigate to the desired category and find the bell icon in the top right. Click this and choose Watching to receive every post, repeat this for all categories you wish to receive via email. Note that you can stop receiving emails for specific topics by visiting that topic and changing the option under the bell.
In order to create topics via email, you will need to send a new email to a specific email address for the category you wish to post to. This email address can be found in the About topic inside the category, e.g. About the Xway category. The topic will be pinned to the top unless you have unpinned it.
If you use filters in your email client, e.g. to automatically put the emails in folders, you will need to use different filters. The simplest way to filter will be to filter for emails coming from noreply@discourse.softpress.com with a subject that contains [Softpress Talk] [Xway], replacing “Xway” with the appropriate category name.
Your email client must respect the Reply-To address for replying via email. noreply@ will not accept any incoming emails but your email client should automatically use the Reply-To address which will look something like replies+abc123@discourse.softpress.com.