Activity Summary - option to turn off suppression when the user has been emailed

Feature
1

We have a problem on our forum; our Activity Summaries have become unhelpful due to our use of using Watching First Post per category avidly, and having lots of users who are very email based. This could be fixed by having an option to ignore emails to the user (at the moment they cause it to be suppressed).

The problem is that they get emailed about relevant Topics; this then suppresses an Activity Summary. Then we have a few days with quite a few replies, but no new Topics. An Activity Summary pops out, but only includes content of little interest to the users - and misses the replies to the topics which they have already been notified about. This behaviour makes sense in most forums - double notifications suck - but we’d like it different in ours.

We could partially solve this by not using Activity Summaries (miss out on a great feature), by making them Watch the categories instead (they get emailed to death from busy categories), or by not using Watch First Post and muting all less relevant content instead (difficult to administer and makes the muted stuff hard to access). None of these are great options.

This request refers to:

2

I can’t understand what you are describing here? It sounds like a bizarre use case.

3

I believe what’s going on here is “People (with aggressive email filters) would still like a summary of the most interesting posts, even if they’re posts they have already received”.

Unfortunately, there’s no way to tell the email client about this (and if there was, massive spam abuse…)

I suggest directing people to /top/weekly !

3 Likes
4

I think that it has nothing to do with email/spam filters. And if they are only emailing then how will they view top/weekly?

The OP wants an Activity Summary that includes activity (replies) for topics for which the user has already been notified by Watch First Post. Apparently those topics are suppressed.

Assuming that is correct then the following is a longer explanation:

  • The OP is using Watch First Post to reduce the number of emails sent to users.
  • The Watch First Post notifications generally suppress the Activity Summary.
  • But eventually no new topics are created frequently enough to suppress the Activity Summary.
  • The Activity Summary doesn’t show any replies on topics they got first post notifications for.
  • So the Activity Summary largely has no topics that those users are interested in.

So why not just suppress the Activity Summary if it is ineffective? The OP still wants it but needs this feature to make it useful for them.

3 Likes
5

Thanks @Remah, you have explained my problem much clearer than I did (despite me trying really hard!).

That is a really good suggestion, and could be a great way to deliver the same functionality.

2 Likes