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E-Mail subscription to CATEGORY or DISCUSSION or ALL

cmicmi
edited August 2007 in Vanilla 1.0 Help
Does anyone know about an extension which can be used to subscribe to a: - CATEGORY - DISCUSSION - ALL posts to have the latest in the users private inbox? It would help a lot to get discussions going... PLS, help!
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Comments

  • adrian.adrian. ✭
    rss is the future.
  • cmicmi
    agreed, BUT: almost everybody is reading his/her email all day and more than 2/3rd are used to it. not so with rss for now and the next 2-3 years. See it as interims scenario!
  • Poke AlexPoke Alex
    Right. For those of us who have to cater to users other than hyper-saavy developers and other early adopter-types, emailing to and from a web forum is still a great idea. RSS rules, yes, but try explaining it to old people who have been using Yahoo! groups for eight years or so.
  • MinisweeperMinisweeper New
    The real question is, are any email clients capable of RSS feed subscriptions? If not then that needs to be tossed into the pan somehow.
  • KrakKrak New
    Yes. Thunderbird has a RSS feature.
  • alexisalexis
    Unfortunately most people doesn't use that feature :( , I love Thunderbird.
  • silverwingsilverwing New
    Thunderbird has RSS???? :0)
    I think Feedburner offers an email service of posts through a thrid party, so that might work, too.
  • lechlech ✭
    I don't even have a mail client :D FireFox has RSS via Sage and other extensions and I'm quite happy with it :D
  • gigingergiginger New
    I was using the RSS in Thunderbird up until today. It kept duplicating items though which was getting really annoying.

    I'm now using this. Working pretty well so far. Doesn't duplicate feed items. Pretty customisable. Has OPML import/export so if I see something better I can switch a lot quicker :D
  • lechlech ✭
    it's all a matter of personal prefference :D
  • cstudercstuder
    I second that: Normal users don't know about RSS and would prefer email subscribtions. Plus the RSS-support is pretty limited now...
  • lechlech ✭
    Actually, RSS is growing on a daily basis, believe it or not. However, this is typically coming through from the bloggers end of the spectrum while bigger sites slowly adapt. In the end, everyone and their dog will have RSS capabilities. I'd frankly like to see email replaced with something that's a bit more spam-proof.
  • cstudercstuder
    I agree. But here and now 'normal' users want emails. (I currently host a low-traffic forum with a lot of not-so-frequent-internet users and they wouldn't come back to the site if I didn't constantly remind them to.) (Hell, even my portable gaming platform now supports RSS...)
  • gigingergiginger New
    How about an RSS feed that e-mails?
  • BergamotBergamot
    A big problem is that most automated emails now get blocked as spam
  • lechlech ✭
    for small boards, it might be a great feature, but for large ones that have threads with major ammounts of thread traffic, having to check your email + the thread in question becomes an organizational nightmare sometimes and the board opts you in for each thread you create/reply to. It also taxes the server a bit to perform sending of mail when there are 50 people subscribing to 50 different threads at the same time or in the same hour. So on the bandwidth end of the spectrum (for those who have limited bandwidth hosting) this could pose as a bad option. I would recommend anyone attempting to code an extension like this to take most of these facts into account :)
  • eBeB
    edited December 2005
    It also taxes the server a bit to perform sending of mail when there are 50 people subscribing to 50 different threads at the same time or in the same hour. So on the bandwidth end of the spectrum (for those who have limited bandwidth hosting) this could pose as a bad option.
    I guess if you had a large graphical email this might be a problem, but most subscription emails I've seen are just two lines or so. Something like this:
    Dear [username],
    A reply has been posted to the thread [thread_title] to which you have subscribed. Click here to view the thread. Click here to unsubscribe.

    --[forum_name] Thread Subscription Service
    I can't imagine that being more than 2 or 3 kB.
  • lechlech ✭
    3k over 150 mails an hour adds up for a seriously large user base, and I'm aiming low there since I have no real numbers to work with. I'll remain optimistic and hope people are like me and use a feature like this once in a really great while. But I know there are some who need confirmations via email to each and every thread they post/reply to. I think a better alternate solution could be some kind of personally formatted RSS file which performs the same function. Simply saying "hey, this thread you subscribed to has an update!" with minimal info in one shot. Otherwise it remains cached and/or empty.
  • cstudercstuder
    I really would like this feature web-wide...
  • channingchanning
    Hi, I would like to use Vanilla for discussion forums that a small number of our clients will use. They are not techies, they probably ask someone to print their email ;) There is no way they will know what to do with an RSS feed - email is challenging enough. So I would really appreciate email notifications to updates in discussions that users have participated in. A daily or even weekly summary would suffice as the volumes of posts will be low.
This discussion has been closed.