Forum - email integration

Summary:

My users are complaining bitterly about forums

Forum - email integration

pieterh 15 Sep 2006 13:20

I'm getting lots of negative feedback from people who want to use email to discuss stuff, when I'm asking them to work via forums.

My proposal is to make some clean integration between forums and email:

1. A checkbox option on all forum threads 'Watch this thread?'
2. All forum threads where a user posts to are automatically watched.
3. A watched thread sends email for all new posts to the user's address.
4. The user can reply to these emails, and these replies are processed as thread posts.

I think there are other areas where simpler (not via RSS) email integration is desirable but the forums are the main area I see today.

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Re: Forum - email integration

michal frackowiak 16 Sep 2006 00:39

Hi,

there are some reasons not to include this functionality at the current stage:

• watching threads is ok. also a summary of all threads (or new all new posts) where the user has posted seems to be fine. rss from this would be fine too.
• but sending emails eats resources. when would the emails be sent? directly when posting messages? => delays. scheduled checking for new posts? quite ok, but duplicates rss.
• replying is dangerous a bit. email addresses can be faked.
• most important: it would also mean a lot of code to write and some complication inside the core code.

What I would rather do is to first develop the Plugin API and implement such email notifications as a plugin — not as a core functionality. On the other side emails -> posts could be handled by an external application using the Core API which I am also planning to create.
Later on such plugins/extensions could be enabled (at least on Wikidot.com) on a "per site" basis.

I have the same problem with the forum at http://www.torun.linux.org.pl (Torun Linux User Group) — it is very hard to convince them to use forums and abandon our old-style mailing list.

cheers — michal

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Michał Frąckowiak @ Wikidot Inc.
Visit my blog at michalf.me

Re: Forum - email integration

pieterh 17 Sep 2006 08:10

If you achieve a good integration of forums and email you get something like an email list per thread, which can be very nice.

This is a big weak spot of traditional forums (and wikidot forums) so I hope you'll come back to this when the plugin system is working.

Google groups work quite nicely with the 'reply to' email model, and although it's insecure in theory I've never seen this used for spamming.

What I'd suggest for notifications is that you provide a more abstract model, in which users can ask for notification very simply in various areas of the application - admin functions, page changes, new posts, etc. Notifications would then be processed by various services (RSS, email) that would be configured on a per-site basis. Hardcoding RSS is probably a mistake.

In my experience, very few people are experienced with RSS, and the extra work of configuring feeds is enough to make it unusable.

As usual the goal should be to make it really simple for the user… :-)

When you can convince a LUG to switch from email lists to your forums, you know you've succeeded.

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Re: Forum - email integration

michal frackowiak 18 Sep 2006 15:47

Hi,

I do not think that hardcoding RSS for forum (per-thread, per-category etc.) is a mistake — it is a feature that some people use and consider this much more convinient than email notifications. E.g. I use a desktop application for aggregating feeds (Liferea) and if I want to watch a thread I simply drag&drop the url of the RSS feed into the application — that is all! I am notified about each post no longer than 5 minutes after it is posted. Clicking inside the RSS item takes me directly to the specific post. This IS easy.

But OK — notifications for individual users are somehow a shortcut. I wanted to implement configurable notifications but at the moment I have decided rather leave this "as is" and do not add extra complexity. But again — if you use any feed agregator you can easily configure your notifications (both site admin, individual and watched threads/pages) quite easily.

What I was planning was indeed what you are writing about: configurable notifications flow ("common bus") which can be piped do different outputs (RSS or Email). Currently RSS is the "common bus" which can be converted to almost anything you want (using the external services). I will work on it ;-)

Anyway — I think my LUG will be convinced soon because you can easily make a RSS » Jabber IM conversion and be notified by your IM within minutes after a change occurs ;-)

michal

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Michał Frąckowiak @ Wikidot Inc.
Visit my blog at michalf.me

Re: Forum - email integration

Matt Wilkie 22 Feb 2008 10:18

I respect the technical difficulties of the load email integration could place on the server resources, and in dealing with spam. I'd still like to put in a vote for some manner of email integration.

The main problem with forums is that they assume and require a constant network connection to function effectively. Email is much better at enabling the sometimes-on, sometimes-off user. Dialup users are getting increasingly rare but they do still exist, however portable computing (laptop, notebook, phone, etc.) is on the rise as is the use of internet cafe's.

The reason I'm waking up this old thread at all is because I have a significant user who pays for his internet access by the minute. Consequently our current workflow is that he emails me the changes and additions and I transcribe it., while I in turn email changes (but only significant ones). The project goal makes this worthwhile but it is not sustainable and narrows would could be contributed.

A middle ground for one side of the exchange might be if the RSS Feeds could be configured to export the content of the change and not just the name of the page or forum post. I could then send this through a feed-to-mail gateway. I don't have any bright ideas how for going the other way though.

I realise the circumstance outlined might be a pretty small section of the total user base and so not worth a lot of effort. I hope some measure of thought will be applied nonetheless. :)

thank you.