Would be an interesting feature if the community admin could push an important topic to the entire community via email. Users may get the digest, but if there’s breaking news, would be neat if this could be broadcast somehow.
Currently, the only option is to add a topic to the one default category we have people watching, which only admins can post in. But would be better if the original post could be shared directly
Why not just export your user list via Admin, Users and feed the emails into the mail blasting service of your choice?
Yes, that could work, and if no other solution presented itself, I would consider paying for a 3rd party service to do this. Current MailChimip basic service covers 2K users for free, and goes up to $55 / month for 5K to 10K users.
From a speed perspective, if I see a topic on my mobile device and I want to send it to the community, the steps to blast it out through a 3rd party service would make it a bit cumbersome. Having a full time-job while running a community on the side, I’m always going to look for efficiencies :). So if I’m not going to able to make good use of the $660 / year, not sure it’s a wise spend.
I thought this could be a way to help drive community engagement for sites driven by news, and help the sites grow. Realtime push of something relevant for the community, at a timely moment, could keep users active. Currently, we have digests which showcase what is popular, but by the time the email gets sent, the topics featured may already be a bit outdated.
Could be a paid feature for Discourse Enterprise. Something to think about.
Interesting. If we limited it to highly trusted customers, it might be more possible.
@codinghorror may be interesting to also consider a way of broadcasting a topic via Chrome notifications. I have to imagine that the notifications are helping bring back users.