Custom summary email plugin

What would you like done?

We are seeking proposals for a summary email plugin. Our group came from a Google Groups background and expects a daily summary with an excerpt from every post, not just a teaser like the built-in Discourse summaries. I implemented a solution in Python using the API when we transitioned to Discourse about a year ago, but it has certain limitations, and would be better implemented as a plugin.

I would provide a template for the emails. The plugin would populate the template with:

  • user name
  • a table of topics having new posts today
  • group the posts by topic
  • poster’s username, timestamp, and an excerpt (first 200 chars) from each new post
  • there are several hyperlinks within the email and to the forum (see figure)

The summaries should respect permissions and the user’s muting of topics and tags.

The summaries should respect edits and deletions- send the latest version, or none if the post was deleted.

Sometimes a post includes a long link, which wastes space and messes up the formatting. Replace any long links with the text “[long link, see forum]”

Need a way for users to opt out of the summaries. I currently have digest emails disabled, but can enable them if the plugin wants to use those user options. Open to suggestions.

We have about 1000 users, and typically 50 new posts in 20 topics each day. The mailing should be done at night US time. If it takes an hour to run, that’s ok.

When do you need it done?

No deadline as we have a working solution already, next month or two would be great.

What is your budget, in $ USD that you can offer for this task?

Open to offers

If you haven’t heard from anyone on this, please feel free to contact me. Contact info is in my profile.

Thanks Jay. We have a solution nearly finished now. For anyone interested, we broke the problem into two pieces.

  1. A plugin that gathers the data and posts json to a webhook, one request for each email to be sent. Data includes the username and email, and the topics and posts to be included in the digest (all of them, not just 5).
  2. The webhook assembles and sends the emails. In our case this is some Python code I wrote, but perhaps a mail service could do this part.

Feel free to PM me if you have similar requirements.

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