Notification emails have changed

Hello! o)

I noticed that the notification emails have changed in appearance.
Did you notice as well? o)

cu, tb

Yes :slight_smile:

Ok, and do you know why that is and if it's going to stay like this? o)

Discourse is under active development and gets updated all the time.

Yep, I can clearly see the development there.. o)

We went from this kind of notification..

to this.. uhm. o)

The reduced notification obviously requires you to visit the forum for each incoming post.
This might raise forum visits, but it also might not, thereby reducing replies and volume even more.

Maybe you find a switch you can turn back on, I would appreciate it.
It was one of the very few features of Discourse I kinda had an advantage of.
Not diving into the Discourse pain here any further. Thanks! o)

The problem with the old emails was they didn't reflect edits made to posts.

And the new simple notification will be sent again, whenever somebody edits a post?

I didn't think email notifications were re-sent on edits. That would cause a lot of spam and be something I would want to turn off, if it does happen.

With editing enabled, the only place it really makes sense to read messages is on the forum itself. The emails just help people know when there is a message to read. Since a sent email cannot be updated, it doesn't make sense to include a potentially old version of the message in the email and then have people not see additions/corrections/changes which were made after the email was sent, which they won't even know are there unless they visit the forum.

If things don't go back as they were before, one route open is to use RSS instead of email to track replies (just append .rss to a thread URL) and even to track new threads.

Depending on the feed reader, it can even alert you when changes are made to a message (if Discourse updates the RSS too, which I haven't tested, but should be simple to test).

@Leo
If I think twice, it seems there is very little difference between knowingly reading a possibly outdated post directly in the email vs. reading a post in the forum which could be updated 2 minutes later. In both cases you will miss the update and everyone is aware of this fact.

The email, even though it might not contain the latest and typo-free version of the post, it still allows to get the greater picture behind. Whether someone adds another line later on, I probably don't care, but I can still see whether there is serious text going on or just "thanks" or "me too" kind of post I probably don't want to dive into further.

The new notification does not even include the User name of the poster, which in itself was useful to classify the action going on (which is really bad compared to what we had for years with phpBB).

@andersonnnunes
Yes, I revisited the RSS thing a while back, I think it's still very useful to get a summary of what is going on, but tracking individual threads with it, it's probably not the right thing.

tl;dr;
My feeling is that the small risk of reading an outdated post via email is insignificant compared to the useful context it provides in 99,9% of all other cases, so I vote for bringing the full blown notifications back! o)

I also cannot follow conversations on my older mobile phone now anymore by just reading mails. I won't open the bloody crap of browser on the phone for this. Mobile browsers are a pita to me. Aside from this, my impression is that activity is already getting lower and lower, if the forum throws in another hurdle to keep in touch, where is this going to end? o)

Thank you! o)

ps:
Tech-wise, things are getting silly these days. Compare how we accessed text based information several years back. Any computer with a random browser or mail reader would do (thinking phpBB and mailing lists here). Now there is Discourse and the browser you can still use to buy and pay things on eBay is not enough to read freaking forum texts. My somewhat old mobile phone also is not capable any longer to access simple text responses with all this html5+js+fadein+fadeout nonsense going on. Insane and just something I am fighting. o)

It's a web forum, not a mailing list :slight_smile:

If you check your email 2 hours after the old version was sent, you still see the old version. If you read the web version you don't.

Let's move on, please.

Is there any setting that allows me to get any preview or meaningful content into a forum notification?
I'm member of different discourse based forums and see e-mails like this:

As someone mentioned above current content of e-mail herein is
grafik
which is a bit useless, isn't it?

There isn't.

The forum is the place to read messages, and the only place you can actually see the latest version of a message with all the edits (on any Discourse forum/configuration).

Emails are only useful for notifications telling you there's a new message. They aren't a good way to read the forum, as they do not get updated when people add/correct information in their posts.

Yes, of course you're right, however, I recently got a buch of messages from the forum of a subscribed topic and all messages were exactly identical! That's by far not ideal.

I cannot decide whether I want to visit the forum or simply ignore one or all answers. That's it and so the content of a notification is still important (to me).

Btw, I did not find any option in other Discourse forums in my user preferences, so either the software is newer (or older) or the administrator defines the detail of (e-mail) messages...

We've turned message content back on in email notifications as there's a delay for editing before emails are sent now, which solves most of the issues we had with notifications going out too soon.

Later edits will still be missed, of course, so it still makes sense to check the forum itself without relying on the emails entirely.

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Thank you very much! I wonder how you always keep track of the many issues here and answer them months and years later nevertheless :grin:

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