The Discourse “Activity Summary” (formerly known as the digest email) is an email sent out to members of a forum who haven’t visited in a specific period with a collection of the most popular content since their last visit. Here’s the Discourse FAQ about them.
We have always disabled this feature. We’d like to enable it, but there are a few options to consider.
Right now the frequency is set to Never. When we change it, it can be set to: every 30 minutes (lol), every hour (lol), daily, weekly, monthly, or every six months.
When we change the frequency, the changes can be made retroactively and apply to current users, or just apply to new users, in which case (I think) nobody with an account would be auto-enrolled.
The advantage to the doing it retroactively is that it would serve as a reminder to people who hadn’t logged in for a while that we still exist. The disadvantage is that everyone would have to opt out, either from the unsubscribe link in the summary email or from their user preferences. If we don’t make it retroactive, existing users could still opt in from their user preferences.
Keep in mind that the email summary is only sent to users haven’t visited the forum, so if we set it for weekly (or monthly) and you log on once a week (or month), you should never get the summary email.
So two things to vote on:
How frequently should we send out email summaries?
Hourly
Daily
Weekly
Monthly
Every 6 Months
0voters
Should email summaries be turned on retroactively?
Yes, users should have to unsubscribe or opt out of summary emails
No, users should have to opt in to get summary emails
0voters
goreo
Made this a banner . It will appear at the top of every page until it is dismissed by the user.
2
Forcing people to unsubscribe to nagging emails is a super awful terrible shitty sort of thing that this forum should never ever do to anybody for any reason and I have no idea how somebody could vote yes to that question unless they don’t understand they are voting in favor of the forum sending annoying fucking emails to people that they didn’t ask for and forcing them to unsubscribe to stop getting them.
idk, I’m counting the hours before I check out of all this stuff for good. In general, my parting thought would be that there are way too many polls and staff should just do what they feel is best without asking permission. Wildly unpopular decisions can be reversed if necessary.
We barely have a any new users, fwiw. It’s like maybe 1 or 2 a month.
just free yourself from it man, I got this. It seems to be something you really wanna do.
I didn’t wanna unilaterally be like “I’m sending email digests out because I think it’s cool and we have the capability!” but I generally agree we shouldn’t make polls for every tiny decision. This seems like something I kinda want community feedback on. But stuff like, for instance, I changed the time to live for registration links because (imo) i thought its default was way too long. I’m not gonna go make a poll over something like that.
But basically I would really hate to do something on my own and have the community be like, “yo wtf.”
I’d like to hear more about this, like who is the “we” and why do they want to enable it? Mainly because:
If I’m registering for a forum I’m not intending to sign up for an email list. Admittedly I have an extremely strong anti-spam bias so I might not be representative of site users generally.
My $0.02 is to only enable the digests/summaries if they are opt-in, even for new users. If the default is “on” i.e., opt-out, I wouldn’t enable it. Like I said, my opinion.
I did I have a thought, which is that enabling it as an opt-out could actually hurt the forum, albeit in an indirect (and possibly negligible) way: if users get the summary emails without understanding why, and they collectively pound the “report as spam” buttons at their email providers, it could hurt our “reputation” as a site and make it harder for our “real” important emails to get through to people. I’m not an expert on email antispam stuff though so this is a little speculative.
I’m pretty sure that’s a thing, but probably not anything to worry about.
Don’t even get me started on email filtering… lol
We are getting perfect 10/10 scores on all email testing sites I’ve used in the last day. Apart from some super sketchy looking blacklist our IP is on because of Digital Ocean (they host spammers apparently), our reputation should be really good.
I’m not sure what percentage of users here registered with an active email address so it may not matter to them.
Sending email to a user without their permission is a shitty thing to do and a major problem with email in general.
Z, we have so many polls because we are trying to convince ourselves that we are a community managed site. Sorry to hear you’re disengaging, thank you for your contribution and I hope you find what you’re looking for.
One other thought: have you guys looked at what the summary emails actually contain? Because I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re lame, and if that’s the case, it’s probably not worth the costs to implement. Again just imo.
I voted yes, but I want to clarify. It should be a one-time email so that all users can know that they can now receive a digest.
I get daily emails from Reddit, Quora, Daily Kos, Yahoo Sports, and probably lots of others. Sometimes I click through to interesting-looking stories, even if I’ve been off that site for a while.
I haven’t seen the conclusion of the recruiting new users discussions, but if that’s something we want to do, daily summaries of the most active topics or best posts with share buttons would go a long way.
