I am in the process of setting up a new forum and already people have said they don’t like the digest emails. Now rather than turn them off I would like to change the frequency to 1 month or perhaps even 3 months.
Trouble is the setting maxes out at 2 weeks, is there a way of making this longer?
Thanks
This can be a thing because the first 50 members of the forum (during the bootstrap mode) get daily digests, and after that it goes back to the default (weekly).
I have set it to 2 weeks, does this mean that the setting is ignored for the first 50 registrations?
But that isn’t so much the question but rather is there a way of setting the time longer than 2 weeks? The kind of forum I am starting is quite specialized low volume and users will certainly find emails ever 2 weeks irritating.
No we don’t have an option for more than that. Also, the users who have already signed up will need to change it in their settings or unsubscribe. The digest emails have unsubscribe links and instructions in them.
What is the thinking behind the 2 week limit rather than just having a box to enter number of days?
Why number of days? Why not number of minutes?
I think that should answer your question 
What I am trying to say is why limited set of options?
Seems odd that I can only choose 1 hour or daily, what if I wanted 8 or 12 hours? In my particular case I would like 1 month.
Would it not be better to have a number box and Days/Hours/Minutes drop down.
So In this example I can put 8 in the box and select hours or 30 and select days?
No such option is planned for the forseeable future. We also won’t be adding a milliseconds box…
Shame looks like I am stuck with disabling it completely so as not to annoy everybody 
The particular trouble is the way Discourse is packed as a Docker container it makes it much harder to modify it myself. With things like WordPress or Magento overriding the code in a way that survives an update is simple.
I wouldn’t know how to code it, but I think there’s a good chance you could use a plugin so changes would survive updates.
It is easy enough to override the site setting
https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/master/config/site_settings.yml#L1315-L1318
The trick would be getting the custom value to be considered valid
https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/master/app/models/digest_email_site_setting.rb
It’ll be annoying only those people who don’t visit your forum.
And among those only the few who are not really interested in your forum. In other words, you are trying to cater for the least important minority on your site and in a way that helps them stay away from your forum…
Can you explain why low volume means the digests will be annoying? For low activity sites, the digest seems like a useful feature since people aren’t likely to visit every day and might stop visiting altogether. The digest should give them a reason to come back. Without it, your community would become abandoned, wouldn’t it? The digest will only be sent when there’s something worth telling people about, with a minimum of 2 weeks in between each email (if you set it that way).
The problem is that some people just don’t like to be pestered. In some communities like the one I am talking about there will be a small group of active users where as others will only drop in when then they are working on a project.
For example lets say you have a community about camping. Most people will do their camping in the summer and will join in discussions about what equipment to buy or where to set-up camp. These people will only really be active when they are planning a camping trip. Others however are expert or hardcore campers who go camping all year round and want to talk about the subject all the time.
So some people are going to get annoyed receiving a digest with posts from the same few dedicated people every 2 weeks. However if it was possible to set the frequency to a longer period then people would be less likely to be annoyed by an infrequent email. But they will end up still getting an occasional email so when summer comes around again they will remember to visit the forum.
I just think that the limited choice doesn’t allow for situations that are not busy sites where you don’t want to keep pestering the infrequent users. Having the emails too frequent will just result in more people unsubscribing and then they are lost completely as they forget the site.
A little update on this one - the default email digest frequency options now include monthly and six monthly:
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