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+--- Thread: Suggestions for email support (/showthread.php?tid=7305)
Suggestions for email support - broccolimama - 08-08-2013
The AO email list has in the past couple of days seen a renewal of interest as people realized that there are quite a lot of us who really do not like the forums for various reasons and thus aren't getting the support we need to continue with AO or even a CM education. Kathy Livingston has been helpful in making suggestions, and suggested that the ideas for improvement belonged here. Because I don't access the forums, I am just copying and pasting my email here in hopes that maybe it will help those who need email support, where the forums just aren't working for them:
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>Unless you were reading every post on the AO list, HEO, AmbleRamble, and
Year 0 (as well as the FB page), you were not getting everything before the
change. You just didn't realize it because you didn't see what you were
missing.
Maybe I'm the unusual one, but I was subscribed to AO, HEO, AmbleRamble (but not year 0)
and was on the FB page while it was there. I didn't read every post on the FB page (because
it's a quick type of communication meaning it's *really* active, indeed, too active to keep up on
fully for one individual), but most of the time I did skim all the emails that came through my inbox.
I only read in depth the ones that were of interest to me or caught my eye for some other reason,
but usually everything got at least a cursory glance, which is how you catch those I-didn't-even-know-I-needed-this
posts and discussions. : )
>get the email for the new thread, it includes the first part of the first
post, as well as the post title, so I have an idea if I care or not.
If it has an excerpt of the first post, then why not the whole first post, with separate emails
for each new post in the thread (with the full text)? I know it's possible because I did some
looking today at forums with full email integration. Then the email folks could get
the full benefit of the forums in a format that's more convenient. Even if we had to go to the forums
to post a new thread or reply, being able to read via email would be awesome!
>find a niche, you can get comfortable in the community, and then when you
have time check out the New Posts area to see what posts are coming through
elsewhere--it shows the title and some of the text of the latest post.
When you click on the "View New Posts," is there a way to see the text of the latest post
without hovering, like an automatic way to have that expanded without having to hover over
each post? Perhaps I have slow internet or something, but hovering to read even a text excerpt
takes a lot of time (unless you go directly from one to the next down the line... even a slight skip makes
a significant pause for the text to pop up).
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So, I know full email integration IS possible. There are forums online that are doing it, meaning that a person can basically subscribe to a whole forum (for example, to the Form III forum) and get all the posts and whole threads emailed to them, so they receive all the stuff in their inbox and don't have to go to the forum.
I'd love to see this happen with AO. That way the forums could stay as they are, and people who like the forums could still come to the website and use the forums in the traditional way, but those who have been left behind (and there are a lot of them!) would be able to use email pretty much they way they have been on the Yahoo Groups list.
RE: Suggestions for email support - Phyllis - 08-13-2013
I'm sorry it has taken me so long to answer this! I wanted to from when I first saw it.
We have discussed a daily digest in the past. At this point I don't have the skill to write the necessary plugin, nor do I have the time to learn yet, even though I really want to. I have also written back and forth about it with the developers on the MyBB board, but so far no one has come up with what we need. (Does anyone here have experience with message boards, php and plugins? I could really use your help!)
I did set the notification emails to contain the whole email, but I think that got lost when I upgraded last time. I'll reset it. However, it will still only send the first message in a thread, until you come visit. Sorry. That's the way it works.
Also, it would be possible to subscribe to individual (sub)forums using RSS, but we sacrificed that to privacy. It would only work if the forums were visible to the whole world, and we're not comfortable with that. That may be what you're seeing on other forums? Give me details about what forums you see with a setup that you like, though, and I'll go look....