Subject: [GNOME Discourse] Email issue -- Post too short
Date: Mon, 03 Apr 2023 19:17:10 +0000
We’re sorry, but your email message to [“1974f9802145eafd3e400dfaf6254454@discourse.gnome.org”]
(titled Re: [Applications] Evolution issue with Opensuse Tumbleweed) didn’t work.
To promote more in depth conversations, very short replies are not allowed. Can you please reply
with at least 20 characters? Alternatively, you can like a post via email by replying with “+1”.
The message I sent looks like this:
Hi,
On Mon, 2023-04-03 at 13:55 +0200, RenePaul via GNOME Discourse wrote:
> I’m out home. I’ll keep you informés as soon as I’m at home.
Ah, I see. I do not know why I thought you've the machine handy/around.
No problem at all, whenever you'll find some free time.
Thanks and bye,
Milan
(I foresee an answer of kind: “report upstream, please”, but I’ve no account on their site/bug tracker/ whatever they use, thus, if it’s the case, do move it there yourself, please. Thanks in advance.)
Here’s a bug that looks maybe like what happened with your email: Over aggressive Gmail eliding - bug - Discourse Meta. Maybe for a similar reason parts of your email were left out and not counted towards the minimum length. Take a look at the raw email that was sent, if this looks plausible.
I try to avoid HTML as much as possible, thus my message is Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" being the only part of it, with content:
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Hi,
On Mon, 2023-04-03 at 13:55 +0200, RenePaul via GNOME Discourse wrote:
> I=E2=80=99m out home. I=E2=80=99ll keep you inform=C3=A9s as soon as I=E2=
=80=99m at home.
Ah, I see. I do not know why I thought you've the machine handy/around.
No problem at all, whenever you'll find some free time.
Thanks and bye,
Milan
I agree with you, the upstream bug you referenced can be related. I guess they found the top Hi,, and then the reply attribution, where they stopped counting. They support inline replies, but it seems only if the message starts with the reply attribution, otherwise they stop as soon as they reach the reply attribution. That’s a plain guess from my side.
It looks like Discourse (here) is using the trim method from the email_reply_trimmer gem. I’m not very practiced with reading Ruby code but maybe there’s an issue for your email with that trim method.
I’m not saying this isn’t a bug, but I think it’s an understable one. You’re mixing top-posting (“Hi,”) and old-school inline reply conventions. Honestly it took me a few seconds as a human to understand your message. It’s not super-surprising that the message parsing doesn’t have special-casing to handle this.
Hi,
I did “split” the content/reply, because the “hi” did not fit into the
text I wanted to start my real reply with.
The algo, from my point of view, should consider any non-quoted text as
a real message text, not to stop on some “probable divider” between the
old message and the new/reply message text. That won’t work for inline
replies, of course.
I think the Discourse just tries to be too smart, which is harmful in
this particular case.
What if my attribution of the old message won’t be in an English
locale, would it recognize it or it’ll be overlooked/ignored? Who
knows.
Bye,
Milan