E-Mail subscription to CATEGORY or DISCUSSION or ALL

emergent

I agree with channing - a 'daily digest' would be a nice compromise

GMonkey

I agree email notifications are important for the vast majority of the people using forums. To just stay in the loop, knowing what is going on with a subject. I also think for anyone looking to build a engaged member base, the email over head is worth it. The extension could send a combined subject email once an hour. So if the person subscribes to multiple subjects, they don't receive multiple emails within an hour, but just one with a list of the subjects they subscribe too and what was said. I am trying to build a green living community and this would be very important for me.

comforteagle

Many forums have a 'notify' feature which is basically email notification. The problem with implementing that, as it exists, is that it's hell to manage what you're subscribed to. That's a missing key ingredient.

All that said... if email is what your topic's demographic uses why not just make the forum a bunch of managed mailing lists instead? (I hate email)

ithcy

i wouldn't estimate that email notifications are important for the 'vast majority' of people using forums. very definitely not. i think 'large minority' would probably even be too generous. if people want to stay in the forum loop that much, they'll be on the forum.

to me, a bunch of people getting update emails is the opposite of an engaged member base, because they're not even required to enter the forum at all, let alone participate. if you are going to lurk on my messageboard, you're going to have to at least put forth the effort to sign in. i'm not going to serve your lurking to you.

what comforteagle said. forums are not mailiing lists and they were never meant to be.

channing

I appreciate the comments made above, however the issue for me is that for my user base there isn't an alternative (they barely understand email), and using the web and surfing is not a major part of their day-to-day life. They are not going to engage in a discussion forum as intensely as techies do. For vanilla to be adopted widely I believe this feature is a necessary evil. I certainly cannot use it without email notification which would be a shame, I really like it.

GMonkey

I think channing is right, without a simple email notification system and a few other normal forum options, it will be very hard to stay with Vanilla, even thought I really like the look and feel of it. We now have between 1000 to 3000 people a day on the site and no one uses the forums. A large part of the visitors are coming from traditional forums and jump over to our site for the content, and then go back to the standard forums they are use too, and talk about our site. I think the problem maybe that the forum is so different, in layout and features, that they don't feel comforable using it. Simple things like email notifications, signatures, private messages in a mailbox with a notification of the message and so on. Just basics. I noticed I didn't even feel like I was able to connect with our volunteer staff on the staff forums, even though there were 18 people on the forum talking about one subject, non of us could really talk directly to another person. Yes, you can use the Whisper box to leave a private message in the forum, but there is no notification of it being there or a central location to see whispers. So its all by chance and your own efforts to see the postings. That really doesn't work. If our forums don't pick up in the next 30 days, with our volunteer staff promoting them and taking part in the forums, I will change them to another forum like punbb. Even though I don't really want to at all. I would like to support and promote vanilla. But it comes down to the users, if they wont use it, then what is the point.

Minisweeper

On the private message front i'm assuming you're aware that you can whisper an entire discussion to someone - making it basically a PM. Eitherway users can use the pre-existing discussion filters 'Whispered discussions' and 'whispered comments' in order to find everything thats been whispered to and from them. I dont see how it gets much more central than that. If a whisper is inside a thread then the chances are it's directly to do with the topic of discussion, and if the user doesnt go back to that thread to read it it seems unlikely they're continuing doing whatever it was they were doing associated with the discussion at hand. IN which case the whisper is no longer important.
You may wish the discussion filters in question to be highlighted of have a count number of the discussions/comments they reveal, but although possible that would put a massive extra load on the query and i'm sure you can understand why mark doesnt want do to that. If you wanted to create that as an extension i'm sure there are people who would be greatful.

Signatures are an extension already as far as i'm aware. If not then i'm sure both those and email notification will fairly quickly be created as extensions at the release of v1 when a lot of prospective vanilla developers start strutting their stuff.

As for users not feeling comfortable with the forum as a whole, thats really their issue. There's absolutely no way mark is about to make this forum look like a phpBB/etc replica because thats the exact opposite of what it is. I am, unfortunately, quite certain that someone will be releasing a phpBBish template for use with v1 as this will be easily possible then.

All i'll leave you with is this - Dont give up on us yet. This software really is still in beta phase. Version 1 will be released in the not too distant future (3 months guaranteed, everyone is hoping much sooner - we'll see), and i expect third party development to massively increase when this happens.

If it suits you to move to some other software temporarily or permanantly i'm sure mark would commend your choice of punBB.

Krak

This conversation is just like a lot of others on here. People wanting all these things that Vanilla is not.... It sounds to me like Vanilla is really not suited to what you need/want. You want to add all these features that Vanilla does not have, which what makes Vanilla what it is. If all these features were added and the style changed it would be just another phpbb clone which is exactly what it is not. So if you want a phpbb clone, why not use phpbb. Seems to me that is what you are after.

channing

I was not suggesting that my users are uncomfortable with vanilla as a whole, or that vanilla should be a phpbb clone. I certainly don't want to give up on vanilla, I certainly don't want phpbb, its horrible. But, my users are not technically sophisticated enough to use RSS so I need just one feature: email notifications. Hopefully a plugin will provide this in the future.

Bergamot

The main problem with a "daily email digest" is that I can't think of any way to run a php script at a specified time, short of something cron-related.

channing

hmmm...I guess it would have to be a cron thing.

Bergamot

You *could* run a php function every time someone makes a new comment, and have that function send out an email digest with the contents of all the posts made since the last digest, if, and only if, the last email digest was sent out over [x amount of time] ago.

It wouldn't guarantee that people received an email at the same time each day, but it would make sure they didn't get more than one per day. On a busy-enough forum, that distinction might not matter.

channing

Some interesting points that relate to this discussion: http://blog.centraldesktop.com/index.php?entry=entry060403-214628 and corresponding flame-war: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/04/04/0635240

Huntress

Having been an admin of several forums (one Vanilla included) I've noticed that email notifs do keep the users coming back as opposed to RSS feeds. On one of the sites, of which I'm an admin, we use both and that works well. I'd still ike to to see the email notifs extension developed if at all possible.

WallPhone

I can't think of any way to run a php script at a specified time, short of something cron-related.

The book Advanced PHP Programming covers a technique where you fork a PHP process that stays alive and runs a chunck of code at intervals.

But if an admin at your host sees that its been running for some time and kills it, or bans it because it uses resources, you're a fish out of water.

Poke Alex

Wow, this conversation went on for a long time and got nowhere, didn't it?

Look, I agree that "that's not Vanilla" can be a great argument against not developing a lot of Add-ons. But email notification or digests? That seems pretty basic to me. Personally I would love to use Vanilla for the forum I'm planning to add, but without email support I simply cannot justify the change to my luddite email-centric user base. I'm sure there are others that have the same problem.

PhpBB is a hog, and email support only makes it worse. That's why people are looking for Vanilla in the first place.

And the idea is to make it an Add-on, not part of the core. Administrators who feel it would besmearch Vanilla's honor to add email digest support are always welcome not to install the Add-on, right? The same goes for administrators of board with large user bases that would tax the server.

Bergamot

"That's not Vanilla-like" is only an argument for why it's not in the core.

The reason there isn't an extension is that nobody simultaneously

1. Wants this functionality
2. Has the ability to code it
3. Has the free time to write it

Krak

Is this for
1. email subscription for replies to a post,
or
2. to subscribe to a post and be able to respond to it via email.

1 I can understand, 2 I can not.

But I would have to go with numbers 2 & 3, Bergamot said.

Peter4

cmi wrote:
almost everybody is reading his/her email all day and more than 2/3rd are used to it. not so with rss for now ....

cstuder wrote:
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.)

---

Exactly like that with my users, too.

Is anybody available to code an extension to generate a daily email digest?
This is a paid consulting project.

I want to "push" a daily digest, of all posts, to all members.
(It's a low-volume forum.)
Time of sending not important.
Allow admin to turn off daily digest for individual members, but members cannot turn off themselves.

If anyone can code this, please contact me.
Thank you.

-- Peter

Email: PETER4 ..at.. ALLMAIL ..dot.. NET

"Expats Private List", Bangkok, Thailand

jimw

Does the Notify add-on do what you want?