Weekly digest summary?

[Omri Amos]

Hi,

I just found about a very neat feature of Discourse - some form of a weekly (I think) "Summary" email that includes all the latest popular topics / posts from the forum.

Any chance to see such feature in IPS?

Thanks

 

[tolik777]

Very useful functionality was ...
It would be nice to have a separate setting in personal profile. For example, a digest of interesting topics for the week / month (and so can be customized).
And when send mass mailings to choose: either an administrative letter or digest.

[Justin89]

Bump, I would like something like this for sure.

[iJeff]

+100

[MikeChristopher]

This is one of the better discourse features out there. Is there any possibility of something like this being added to core?  With todays world - this is a great feature in order to retain membership and participation. 

I know there is the newsletter mod but thats not what I am after. 

[Omri Amos]

UP

Just received an even better version of this feature from a discourse forum I'm registered at.
While they keep improving this amazingly engagementing feature, the IPS team keeps ignoring this suggestion.

[LiquidFractal]

3 hours ago, Omri Amos said:

While they keep improving this amazingly engagementing feature, the IPS team keeps ignoring this suggestion.

Not implementing a feature when you happen to want it implemented doesn't mean they're ignoring your idea.

Remember that IPS just completed a generational update - there are other features more pressing than this in terms of what the broader customer base wants.  There's nothing to say this will never appear in a future version.

[Omri Amos]

22 hours ago, liquidfractal said:

Not implementing a feature when you happen to want it implemented doesn't mean they're ignoring your idea.

Not even RESPONDING to a topic in the Feedback and Ideas forum DOES MEAN they're ignoring the idea.

22 hours ago, liquidfractal said:

Remember that IPS just completed a generational update - there are other features more pressing than this in terms of what the broader customer base wants.

How exactly do you know what the broader customer base wants more/less?
Actually the replies here says otherwise.

[iJeff]

I guess w/out this feature, establishing a new community, is extremely impossible. I have one discourse install, and it's hella active, whereas I had to IP for another community that was based on Pro Membership so I ditched discourse for it.. as it's in initial development and does not have 'subscription' model as yet ..... However we might switch to discourse as well for this community, solely because of Summary feature., I meant with SES it dirt cheap to send emails, w/out this Summary Feature we may be soon ditching IP board, Please pardon me for this brutal feedback, however please understand the need for it.... you do have marketplace and it won't accept credit card, and paypal is not supported by our country. 

on a side note, if you get this feature, we might ditch Discourse for the other community and gladly pay for another license? deal?

[LiquidFractal]

5 hours ago, Omri Amos said:

Not even RESPONDING to a topic in the Feedback and Ideas forum DOES MEAN they're ignoring the idea.

How exactly do you know what the broader customer base wants more/less?
Actually the replies here says otherwise.

Sometimes posts and threads are missed because developers are busy, distracted, loaded with work etc. - not to mention answering support tickets, patching bugs, and doing other things involved with developing a sophisticated CMS.  They're human beings, which means they aren't perfect.  Saying that they're simply choosing to ignore what you say because you don't get a response when you want it is an unfounded and quite frankly self-important assumption.

And without claiming to know what everybody wants, it's easy to see that this is one thread amidst scores of others in Feedback and Ideas, sometimes written by people who similarly think their idea should go to the front of the line.  If you want a guaranteed direct response from staff about your idea, submit a support ticket.  But quite frankly, I'd rather they spent their time developing the CMS instead of answering every single forums post from every single person who has an idea about site functionality,

[Omri Amos]

On 9/3/2017 at 11:13 PM, liquidfractal said:

when you want it

"When I want it" ?
This thread is one YEAR old.

 

[Joel R]

On 9/3/2017 at 3:13 PM, liquidfractal said:

Sometimes posts and threads are missed because developers are busy, distracted, loaded with work etc. - not to mention answering support tickets, patching bugs, and doing other things involved with developing a sophisticated CMS.  They're human beings, which means they aren't perfect.  Saying that they're simply choosing to ignore what you say because you don't get a response when you want it is an unfounded and quite frankly self-important assumption.

And without claiming to know what everybody wants, it's easy to see that this is one thread amidst scores of others in Feedback and Ideas, sometimes written by people who similarly think their idea should go to the front of the line.  If you want a guaranteed direct response from staff about your idea, submit a support ticket.  But quite frankly, I'd rather they spent their time developing the CMS instead of answering every single forums post from every single person who has an idea about site functionality,

You don't need to defend IPS.  They choose to not respond to client feedback and they can post in here anytime they want, yet intentionally choose not to respond.  

[LiquidFractal]

My apologies - I completely missed how old this thread was.  With that in mind, yes, it would seem that they have let this drop.  I never said they never did this (I've asked questions here that have gone unanswered), but yes, that's quite a bit of time to let it lie.

[WOFman]

I had that addon feature when I was on Xenforo and it is a great feature. It also gave the option to change the look of the email to one of the themes on your forum. This feature really helped keep people engaged.

[Optic14]

IPS has partially implemented this?

Here I get a daily digest email based on the forums I've followed, but it is quite basic and doesn't seem to show popular topics - just new ones.

Would be great to see it expanded..

[Omri Amos]

You are right, this means that the core support for this feature is basically available (daily/weekly email with list of topics), all they need is to allow it to show popular topics from all the community, instead of just new topics from followed sections, and then of course allow us to send it globally to all users like a newsletter (all users will get the same topics because the popular topics are not user-specific and are not related to the user's followed content).

 

 

[DSystem]

Essential resource that must be implemented. 

[DSystem]

I would also like the IPS e-mail system to receive more attention. Even SMF is better.

 

[Lindy]

On 9/3/2017 at 10:55 AM, Omri Amos said:

Not even RESPONDING to a topic in the Feedback and Ideas forum DOES MEAN they're ignoring the idea.

How exactly do you know what the broader customer base wants more/less?
Actually the replies here says otherwise.

We don't ignore feedback - we can not engage every suggestion that comes in, we often simply need to see where it goes and how popular the suggestion becomes. As an example - your post has had 6 reactions and a few replies in a year (3 last year), whereas, the "selling subscriptions" suggestion has come up multiple times, most recently 3 days ago and already has more "likes" and engagement. Because of this and other avenues of feedback, we recognize subscriptions as something we need to prioritize and we're going to do so. 

There are thousands of ideas in this forum. In coming weeks, we'll be using a new system to log ideas that allows essential up-voting (not to be confused with bumping, which would not be possible) by other clients. We can then get a broader idea of how to prioritize feedback and clients can get a general scope of ideas that are gaining traction. 

Incidentally, simply expanding the digest is something we intend to do to include "our picks" and popular content engagement. I don't have an ETA for this, but it's not something that's years away. 

 

[Matt]

I personally like this idea and the email marketing idea.

However, we have finite developer resources so have to plan carefully. If we could snap our fingers and have features appear, then this would be high on my personal wish list.

We really do appreciate everyone taking the time to post their ideas. Between us all, most are generally read but we don't always reply as we often have nothing firm to say at that time.

As Lindy has said elsewhere, we're reviewing our procedures for collecting, sorting and implementing client feedback in the coming weeks. ?

[Matt]

If I can give a little insight into my thought processes when evaluating a feature:

Email is actually really, really hard to do right. It sounds super simple, and for the odd one or two emails it is. However, with a feature like this, we'd need to find a way to email out potentially millions of times each week at the same time per week without killing your servers.

For a feature like this, you'd certainly want to use an external email provider such as SparkPost, and there are fairly significant costs involved with that.

As each email has to be unique per member, it means that it cannot be pre-compiled adding extra processing power to generate.

All these factors need to be considered and addressed before we can successfully implement the feature.

Hopefully you can understand that when we are looking at a feature, we have to consider all aspects before committing to a feature we have to maintain and support.

[Omri Amos]

3 hours ago, Matt said:

potentially millions of times each week at the same time per week without killing your servers.

For a feature like this, you'd certainly want to use an external email provider such as SparkPost, and there are fairly significant costs involved with that.

Of course that a newsletter (to a large mailing list) will require an external email provider such as SparkPost, I don't see a problem with that.. Pretty obvious IMO.

3 hours ago, Matt said:

As each email has to be unique per member, it means that it cannot be pre-compiled adding extra processing power to generate.

True, however Discourse does seem to handle this without any issues.
In addition to that, please note Optic14's reply - this feature is actually already pretty much exist - all that needs to be done is basically just add popular topics from the community (instead of just new topics from followed sections) to this (unique per member) "notifications email" function, and allow to schedule it separately from the normal "notifications email" (so users could, for example, keep their notifications in-site only, but still get a daily/weekly summary emails of popular topics they might have missed).

Thank you

 

[Matt]

Hi Omri,

Appreciate the reply.

We do have weekly digests for items you follow, but if you consider a community with 500,000 members (not at all uncommon with the communities that host with us), only a relatively small proportion of those will have chosen to actively follow items. This makes the "pool" much smaller, which means there are fewer emails to generate daily.

So while this feature does exist, it's not quite the same. A feature that emails all members weekly is a much bigger undertaking.

I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm just showing that it's a feature that we need to think about carefully for people who choose to host on small shared servers as well as enterprise level clients with millions of members and posts.

[Dll]

6 hours ago, Matt said:

Hi Omri,

Appreciate the reply.

We do have weekly digests for items you follow, but if you consider a community with 500,000 members (not at all uncommon with the communities that host with us), only a relatively small proportion of those will have chosen to actively follow items. This makes the "pool" much smaller, which means there are fewer emails to generate daily.

So while this feature does exist, it's not quite the same. A feature that emails all members weekly is a much bigger undertaking.

I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm just showing that it's a feature that we need to think about carefully for people who choose to host on small shared servers as well as enterprise level clients with millions of members and posts.

2

You already have the functionality to send a mass email to all members, why is that so different? If people want to use it they can/do, if they don't want to, or don't have the server resources (although if they have enough members for that to be a problem, then they probably have enough server power anyway) then they won't. Enterprise or tiny, it's the same difference.

As for the content itself, why not make it an extension of the 'our picks' function and allow those to be pushed out onto an email?

 

[Optic14]

On 29/09/2017 at 11:55 AM, Lindy said:

Incidentally, simply expanding the digest is something we intend to do to include "our picks" and popular content engagement. I don't have an ETA for this, but it's not something that's years away.

 

On 29/09/2017 at 8:27 PM, Matt said:

I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm just showing that it's a feature that we need to think about carefully for people who choose to host on small shared servers as well as enterprise level clients with millions of members and posts.

I am happy to see it is at least on the cards.

It would be a great feature to keep our communities in the minds of members as well as making it easy to pull them into those popular threads/content/curated "our picks" (particularly for lurkers or those that haven't visited awhile).

To my knowledge there isn't a decent 3rd party plugin/application that leverages "our picks" for email so of course a robust, native IPS implementation would be fantastic.