Reply to thread email URLs

I’m often annoyed to be dragged to the bottom of the page when I click the thread’s email notification link. These notices can arrive days, weeks or months after the original thread, long after forgetting its context. I had this same complaint with bug mail, and it got fixed in https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=326809 eventually, resulting in a pair of links instead of just a latest activity link.

Could you admins provide an equivalent here, or does such a request require a new BOO bug?

Hello,

Just for your information.

You question is forwarded to those who know more about the forums software (vBulletin).

Personally I have no idea about the feasabilty of you suggestion, but please, do not be too optimistic. I can only point you to the first, “sticky”, thread at the top of this sub-forum: https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/420809-Why-we-won-t-implement-your-suggestion :wink:

Did that first. I really didn’t get from it whether I should ask what the mods think is in their power first. Should I have asked in irc://freenode/#opensuse-admin or the heroes mailing list instead? I considered to simply clone the BOO bug and change the product. As one of the comments in that bug said, the change was a trivial one to make, but I can’t assume vBulletin would be anything like Bugzilla to manage.

Please, please, do not start the discussion with me and wait until competent people join.

I only wanted to inform you that this thread was brought to the attention of those competent people. so that you do not think your thread went into a black hole by want of answering it.

I know admins are not here 24/7. lol!

Hi,

There is a discussion going on about your request. Not all people understood what you want.

I guess that is partly because almost nobody get any notification mails about threads that were quite about monthes or even years. I personaly do manage my subscriptions and when there are no new posts after a month or so, I unsubscribe. I assume most do.

This in the knowledge that posts added after so long a time are 80-90% spam and the rest is from new members that hesitate to start a new thread and add their problem/question at the end of old threads that have a few keywords in the title that are vaguely reminiscent of their own query. When spam, we will remove (and probably close the thread beacuse being a spam candidate), when new question we will advice the poster to start a new thread because else almost nobody (except maybe you ;)) will notice the post.

In any case, discussion is running high here rotfl!

I thought anything ambiguous would be explained by visiting the fixed bug, so I kept the OP short.

I guess that is partly because almost nobody get any notification mails about threads that were quite about monthes or even years.
I don’t know why time since last post would affect this. When I’m busy or distracted I can have forgotten anything or everything about the thread, so I like to start at the top, then scan down past whatever I recognize, resulting in consciousness of full context as I read the addition. There is no home button on my mouse, and my old fingers don’t like the erratic behavior of mouse wheels. I don’t think many of the eager, creative, under-30 crowd thinking up ways to “improve” UIs have any consciousness how different life can be, particularly the impact paradigm changes, after 60.

I personaly do manage my subscriptions and when there are no new posts after a month or so, I unsubscribe. I assume most do.
I infrequently unsubscribe from a thread. When I do it’s usually caused by bikeshedding or hijacking or deciding I should not have participated in the first place.

In any case, discussion is running high here rotfl!
Is that a place I could subscribe to or watch?

In my case – the first thing that I do after joining a forum, is turn off email notifications (except administrative ones).

And then I try to read the forum in a way that make it easy to see threads with posts that I have not yet read.

Of course, people all have there own preferred ways of doing things.

Well, I got an answer from upstream and they burdened me with the task to forward it.

It will not be implemented.

Main reasons can be found in the sricky thread at the top of this subforum. Lack of (human) resources now and in the future weighted against the limited use case. There could even be arguments to complain against several links given where a choice must be made, while now it is simply a click to land where one was last time.

Who is upstream? Novell/SUSE/Microfocus/Attachmate/whatever, or the web/nntp software?

It will not be implemented.

Main reasons can be found in the sricky thread at the top of this subforum.
That’s awfully generic. Fixing the bugmail 12 years ago was apparently trivial:
It’s a minor change to a template…

Lack of (human) resources now and in the future weighted against the limited use case.
Where/how was this “limited use case” determined? BOO has had it since 2007. RedHat, Mozilla, Gnome, KDE, Freedesktop & other BZ bugmail don’t have deep links.

Open in new tab often means not now, keep reading email now, then on tab arrival after deep link open later, it can be frustrating to determine why the URL is even open, and maybe why other activity notification emails don’t deep link.

There could even be arguments to complain against several links given where a choice must be made,
Not several - two. BOO bugmail links work fine. The trivial decision between link and deep link should be no problem to discern for the kind of people who get them.

while now it is simply a click to land where one was last time.
not simple, because last time may have been long ago. Starting at the top has the same perfectly reasonable use cases as in bottom quote email thread replies, standard netiquette AFAIK for all opensuse.org mailing lists, in common with other FOSS lists.

Modern web pages routinely usurp keyboard’s pgup/pgdn keys’ focus elsewhere to cause yet more mousing & clicking to be required to reach the starting point, the top. Old hands and fingers don’t mouse so well, so this is a usability/accessibility issue as well as a convenience issue.

Where upstream exactly do I need to go to try to get this put into a template so that our “upstream” can simply click a button or two instead of imposing unreasonably on “limited resources”?

Hi
Just to clarify, as of today SUSE and by association openSUSE is officially separate from MicroFocus.

At present MicroFocus are just providing infrastructure support (Forums, login and a few other parts of openSUSE) and the ‘Powers that Be’ have not decided what application(s) will be used in the future, could be vB, but could be something new…

You could fire off an email to the openSUSE Board or admin{at}o.o but likely will not result in much action beyond what’s happening, it’s all W.I.P.

Actually this is encouraging news. I can just forget about it until after the dust on the divorce has settled. Thanks for the info malcolmlewis. :slight_smile: