Truncated email notifications

[BankFodder]

I notice that on the new version 4.5, email notifications are truncated.

I understand the excellent reason for this because rather than giving the full message on the email, it will bring people into the forum.

However, for busy site team members, it causes unnecessary work to have to open every email and then to visit the forum thread to see what is being discussed.

It would be very handy to be able to configure email notifications so that they are truncated for ordinary users and displayed in full for site team.

How about it?

[John T Davis]

I had this issue too after the 4.5 update. One of our users pinged me about the notifications no longer being full-text.

Have you checked to see if System > Settings > Email Settings > Truncate Content is toggled?

It was suddenly toggled on after the 4.5 update. I can't honestly remember if it was a setting I turned off way back on 4.1 that got re-enabled, or if it's something new, but it seems to have fixed the problem.

[BankFodder]

Thanks.

You're right. I found it.

However it would be extremely useful to be able to change truncation according to the user group.

 

I notice that I got a like from @Adriano Faria earlier. Maybe he is thinking about doing a plugin

[CoffeeCake]

1 hour ago, John T Davis said:

I can't honestly remember if it was a setting I turned off way back on 4.1 that got re-enabled, or if it's something new, but it seems to have fixed the problem.

This is new to 4.5, and should live as a group setting.

[BankFodder]

5 minutes ago, Paul E. said:

This is new to 4.5, and should live as a group setting.

 

Sorry. What do you mean by this?

[CoffeeCake]

1 hour ago, BankFodder said:

Sorry. What do you mean by this?

This would have been better implemented at the user group level.

So, folks with a subscription or moderators or some other group of users get the full email while others get the truncated version.

[BankFodder]

I agree completely. This is exactly the kind of thing which is needed. Will invision implement it or will somebody like @Adriano Faria come along and write a plugin for us

Edited September 4, 2020 by BankFodder

[DawPi]

I have something like this:

 

[BankFodder]

Thanks – but will this also allow notification emails of new posts to be selectively truncated?

I have a feeling that you can only do it with private message notifications. Is that right?

[DawPi]

4 minutes ago, BankFodder said:

I have a feeling that you can only do it with private message notifications. Is that right

Yes, only private conversations. As posted in description. 🙂

[BankFodder]

Okay well what we are looking for is the ability to attribute truncate/not truncate to groups.

At the moment it is global in settings/emails/truncate.not truncate  so that the decision to truncate an email applies to everybody including site team.

We really need it in group settings so that each group can be configured individually to receive truncated new post notifications or not truncated new post notifications.

I think this would be a very popular plug-in and it's a bit of a mystery as to why Invision haven't made this standard – unless they hadn't thought about it

Edited September 14, 2020 by BankFodder

[Adriano Faria]

3 hours ago, BankFodder said:

 notice that I got a like from @Adriano Faria earlier. Maybe he is thinking about doing a plugin

Oh no. That was me agreeing with last paragraph. 😀👍

[BankFodder]

34 minutes ago, Adriano Faria said:

Oh no. That was me agreeing with last paragraph. 😀👍

well if you agreed – how about doing a plug-in?  

[bfarber]

There is a technical challenge to implement this (it's honestly the same reason we don't have group-based advertisements in emails right now). For something like Sendgrid, we compile the email and use replacement variables to swap out the email variables (username, etc.). We do this per-language right now, but we'd have to start doing it per-language per-group in order to implement per-group options within emails.

[BankFodder]

Thanks. I don't really understand what you're saying – but still it would be very useful and much appreciated feature of notification emails.

[CoffeeCake]

2 hours ago, bfarber said:

There is a technical challenge to implement this (it's honestly the same reason we don't have group-based advertisements in emails right now). For something like Sendgrid, we compile the email and use replacement variables to swap out the email variables (username, etc.). We do this per-language right now, but we'd have to start doing it per-language per-group in order to implement per-group options within emails.

I think this would be a welcome change and should be considered for your backlog for future improvement. Generally considering the segregation of user levels and user preferences is probably a good idea for new features and enhancements. There's probably always a use case for "this special group of people should be able to get something different and/or choose to get something different."

[bfarber]

On 9/4/2020 at 12:14 PM, Paul E. said:

I think this would be a welcome change and should be considered for your backlog for future improvement. Generally considering the segregation of user levels and user preferences is probably a good idea for new features and enhancements. There's probably always a use case for "this special group of people should be able to get something different and/or choose to get something different."

It's on our radar, yes. It's not an insurmountable technical limitation, I just wanted to clarify that there was a reason this hasn't been implemented just yet.

[MLS]

Thank you for the Truncated email toggle, it is perfect for our community as we don't want full topics or comments going out as emails. 

Is it possible to be able to choose how much text is truncated?

[BankFodder]

And while you're about it, it would be very useful to configure some groups to reply to the thread by email.

 

Clearly you want users to visit the site but for site team, it is most important to be able to respond quickly even if they are on a train.