That’s a total letdown. I’ve been citing mailchimp for years fighting against the concept of a single opt-in. Especially surprised that they shared very little data to support the change.
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Forum notifications are not the kind of “unsolicited commercial email” generally restricted by law as “spam.”
Key words in bold.
If you sign up for a forum expect to get email from the host and as mentioned that feature should be disclosed in the signup/terms and there should be opt-out preferences.
Totally different than, I have this random email addrress so I am going to send a commercial email.
Email service providers may have broader policies than the law. Also the laws differ by location so how and if you are required to get the consent may differ.
Also “generally” meaning that sending an email about the forum might be ok; third party offers maybe not ok unless those types of emails are disclosed.
I am suggesting get the consent via the signup/terms. Otherwise, even the email digest could be suspect–another reason to add the privacy/term link to the invite page.
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Hi All,
With the impending GDPR date soon aproaching. What’s the consensus on sending an email to all of our users notifying them of new privacy policy and information on data control.
All of the various services I belong to this past week have been coming out of the woodwork.
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This feature is so useful, I do not understand why the developers are not willing to implement it.
Specially with GDPR it would be great to be able to use discourse as a mailing list and have all users in a single place.
Why are you not implementing this? other people mentioned that this a basic functionality in other forum software
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Would this work for you?
- Set up an Announcements category that every person who registers watches first post by default (can be set in admin settings)
- Allow only staff to post in the Announcements category to protect users from spam (can be set in category settings)
Now when you post in Announcements, everyone gets the notification, including people who haven’t signed in because with them watching first post, they’ll get emailed with the full text of the post.
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That is exactly what we do. I was puzzled once because I needed to pin a new banner but wanted to make sure that people had access to previous banners and announcements. After all, announcements usually carry information that is useful but once read, if it remains in the landscape, people won’t see it anymore. So I made optin to receive the first post the default for that category, and each new announcement is a new topic. It keeps history, users can all read but only admins can post. Each announcement gets also pinned until it is replaced by a new one. People can of course opt-out from watching announcement but from what I observe, it is one of the most watched channels.
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Me too. That’s a nice sentence. I also landed on this thread searching for such an option.
but this is a point. and a Point well said. Thanks @awesomerobot
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Not quite sure I understand what you are doing here in terms of pinning, can you elaborate? If everyone gets notified of the latest announcement topic, what do you need a pinned topic for, I wonder…
I believe the majority of the intent behind this functionality request could be achieved with the combination of the above recommending pinning/new post + scheduled digests.
A lot of the interest here is for a newsletter case use. A newsletter topic combined with a pinned post for visiting/active users and a scheduled digest (for inactive/passive users), I think would meet a lot of the demand.
Currently though, I’m not sure if it’s possible to schedule a digest in this way:
-TorqueWrench
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Banner pin. For those who opt-out of watching new posts. And because it’s where we sollicitate sponsoring quarterly.
When I originally posted this, watch first post was my strategy of choice but there was a bug with that functionality on our site new accounts would not activate when the functionality was turned on. I never checked later to see if the team had found a fix for this.
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Thanks. I have now implemented this as a test (no pinning, but watch first post as default) and I am just gonna see how the community receives this… I wanna pivot away from email newsletters because Mailch*** etc. are a pain in the a*** 
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