Yes, that’s how “normal users” read emails 
No. But if you pull this feature now, my students cannot get these daily updates anymore, which max out at about 5 posts and are incredibly useful…
I am not adding this back in as is, if someone wants to build a “25 email batch thing with min of 1 email daily” option for mailing list mode I am fine.
But this… no.
Ouch, this sucks.
What will the migration do for existing users with this option enabled?
Flick it to nothing and enable daily summary instead.
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Gosh. What’s the latest beta that doesn’t include this change? Is it this one?
https://github.com/discourse/discourse/releases/tag/v1.8.0.beta11
We have not rolled this back yet, so whatever is latest beta and stable has it.
We are open to funding @gdpelican to extract this into a plugin so its not lost forever in the ether.
Fixing this is a fairly complicated task to do efficiently, cause the pipeline needs to trigger a bulk check on every user with “daily and batched” enabled for every post created. We may also need to add indexes tracking columns.
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As a non-hosted customer, the difference between core and plugin is immaterial – as long as the plugin is maintained going forward.
When we switched over to Discourse in March of last year, a “daily digest” was the most requested feature from our members. Unfortunately, it wasn’t ready yet at the time of our annual get-together. (Or it had just been and I hadn’t noticed, I forget which.)
This year I’d 
to be able to get everyone onboard the “daily updates” train, take on the inevitable attrition, and work at invigorating our community.
In other words, I would be a very happy puppy indeed if I knew what the outlook of this feature looks like in the next two weeks
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Could you help with a database explorer query to see who’s got daily updates turned on now, before we upgrade? Then we can reach out to those users directly to let them know of the change.
FWIW I support this change. Thanks, @sam!
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I’ve have not been following this discussion until recently where I had to hunt down a Sidekiq job that was hogging alot of memory. I’ll like to reiterate that there is alot in there XD On one of our largest site, the PDF for the email is 268 A4 pages long. I don’t see how that can be useful for anyone.
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Rather than pull this completely or hold out for a proper batching strategy, what if something simpler were done first?
Maybe we could just add a sane, hard upper limit on the number of messages that could be included in the daily digest (eg 50 messages). If the number is exceeded, it could just say so transparently and tell people to visit the site to see the other messages.
That way, it stays useful for forums that usually stay under the limit and effectively removes itself for busier forums where it is too expensive and makes no sense as a feature.
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Cool; I kinda knew this writing it, but figured we’d be able to iterate on it at some point; fwiw I think it makes way more sense to simply cap the amount of content which can go in and point users at the site to read the rest, rather than entirely pulling a feature that folks are using.
I’m fully committed until the last few days of May, but it’s not much work to convert this to a plugin and could likely have it done by end of month, so there wouldn’t be too much of a gap between when it’s not available and when it is.
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Having a limit is not enough here 
We’ll also need to truncate posts that are too long or have too many images. Also, there has to be some rule in deciding which posts to show. Is it going to be the 50 latest messages or the 50 most popular messages?
I’m having trouble understanding the use case for this though. For a really large forum, the daily update is so huge that it isn’t even useful at all. For small forums, perhaps sending an email for each post might be a good replacement and won’t be too spammy since activity is much lower on smaller sites.
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Really? And if so, isn’t that an issue for a batch size of 1 as well?
If it were me I’d pick something easy to “stop the bleeding” and then think about this more later if it deserved more thought.
I don’t have a horse in this race myself. I’m just judging from the initial feedback that others may already be finding it useful. Would have to dive deeper with them to really understand whether it’s providing any value.
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To a lesser degree yes, but at batch size 50 it becomes 50x the problem.
The way stuff is selected here makes it tricky to place a limit, sure we can fix it and pick something random and add a “oops too much” string. But we already spent 1 week of engineering debugging this problem. I am concerned that even at batch size of 25 or 50 we can see bloat due to Nokogiri (our html parser) working through the largest document we ever work through in the system.
I totally get that @alehandrof and @fefrei love the feature and want it, but I am thinking of the greater good here and we simply can not ship this feature as is even with limits.
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A small hint for anyone preparing for the fallout: You may want to enable the option to include posts by TL0 users in digests. To do so…
- enable the site setting
default include tl0 in digeststo catch new users ./launcher enter apprails cUser.all.each { |u| uo = u.user_option ; uo.include_tl0_in_digests = true; uo.save! }
You may also want to increase the digest posts setting.
This will flip the switch on for all new and existing users. (It will not affect the digest frequency and whether the digest is enabled, but that should be migrated automatically as per @sam.)
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Because I was mentioned…
I’m interested in any topic relating to the email side of forums, but I’m not looking for a daily updates as a default feature. It would be redundant to what I think is best for the member-only discussion boards I run.
I feel that Discourse administrators should be able to set defaults so that:
- All new users should have key categories set to Watching.
- This applies to all existing topics in the category.
- Every user should have a simple way to opt-out of any given topic.
- Opting out of a topic should look quite different than opting out of the entire forum.
- When a user visits their profile page, it should be simple to switch to daily digest if they chose, however:
- Replies to daily digest emails should not post to any given topic.
So, no I won’t be sad to see this feature go. Historically, people try to reply to messages like these & those replies don’t work.
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Allen, I mistakenly remembered that you were interested in this feature. Sorry about that! I do appreciate your taking the time to respond.
I’m confused, though, because you mention that you won’t be sad to see this feature go, but also (your third point) that users should be able to use it.
The discussion above is not on making the daily digest the default option or not, but on whether it should be a feature at all, given the issues it creates for larger/busier forums.
Edit: hopefully the idea of spinning it out as plugin pans out. That would be fine for my needs, until a better alternative can be put in place.
I’m with Sam, I feel that the Activity Summaries are good enough. If someone doesn’t want every email, then I don’t know that they’re going to read them all in a full digest anyway.
If they care to read every message, all they need to do is follow a summary email link to Discourse, and once online they’ll have a live view of everything that’s unread/new since their last visit.
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Can you or @sam suggest how I can set the following settings for all users (via the console):
I realize that some of these will be taken care of automatically if I upgrade, but I don’t want to do this yet as I got pushback from my community about dropping the daily digest. I’d like to try out a more frequent activity summary though before deciding, though.
The first checkbox is taken care of by what I posted above, the rest should be an easy extension 
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