Default email settings for a new user

[Mittineague]

Whew! Thanks, I thought you were talking about more than new user defaults and gining site Admins the ability to over-ride existing member preferences.

[mcwumbly (Dave McClure)]

I was also confused by that statement. @milen - this topic was opened to discuss Defaults for email settings. I recommend you open a new topic to outline your use case for ‘overrides’ so it can be discussed / debated independently.

[downey (Michael Downey)]

Isn’t an opt-out a requirement of the anti-SPAM laws?

There are lots of different laws out there. In the US, the CAN-SPAM act only requires opt-out information for commercial, non-transactional (unsolicited) email. Transactional messages, whose primary purpose is to communicate transactional content (like a reply to a post or new posts when requested), are mostly exempt from all of the requirements except accurately identifying the sender in the header information.

[jduke (Jon Duke)]

We would also benefit from the ability to automatically assign notification status for new users. Same use case-- coming over from mailing lists.

[sinak1 (Sina Khanifar)]

Any word on whether this’ll make it into version 1.2? I’m hoping to move taskforce.is over to discourse (replacing Google Groups), and I think this is the main feature we’d need to make that happen.

[mochabcha (Channing Hinton)]

Are there any files that I can adjust myself in order to make this a reality. I want new users to be watching certain categories by default. If new user defaults are already in one of the configuration or as variables or arrays in the production files, then I can change it myself with nano.

I see here

Sure, site settings live in config/site_settings.yml you need to add the setting there, then you would need to work through the models/user.rb file to figure out how to add the override.

I would probably use NULL to denote default, amend places that look at it to use the default. If you need a hand you can start a dev topic and point us to your repo.

You can change default settings by just editing this file…is there something like a profile_settings.yml file that allows one to edit default profile settings?

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

Not at the moment, no. Setting default user preferences for all users in Admin, Site Settings has been requested many times and it is on our list.

[mochabcha (Channing Hinton)]

When a new user is created and option variables and arrays are stored to
the data base, is this a file that I can edit and rebuild? is mailing list
mode an option that can be set to 0 or 1 or true or false in one of the
development files?

Even if a configuration file isn’t available or doesn’t exist, there has to
be a function somewhere that sets those variables?

[riking (Kane York)]

Even if a configuration file isn’t available or doesn’t exist, there has to
be a function somewhere that sets those variables?

No, there isn’t a function that does that, that’s the problem.

Currently the database column defaults are used. I suppose you could change that, but…

[mochabcha (Channing Hinton)]

No, there isn’t a function that does that, that’s the problem.

Currently the database column defaults are used. I suppose you could change that, but…

If you could point me in the direction of doing this (which files to edit and such)…That would help me tremendously. Right now I’m having to set the preferences of like 60 users individually, and again for every new user that signs up. Whatever I gotta edit, do or learn…please tell me.

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

At the very least you could do it at the Ruby command line by looping through the users! @riking can you assist with an example?

[riking (Kane York)]

It won’t help very much because I’m not sure there’s a good way to remember who the new users are after the last run. Fixing them all is more suited to import situations, not having new users keep signing up.

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

I think in this case we want to loop through and set it for all users regardless (perhaps skipping those where it is already set) but @mochabcha can confirm.

[mochabcha (Channing Hinton)]

It looks like I’m gonna have to learn some ruby coding. I also have the
issue of figuring out how I’m gonna get the old Google group imported into
discourse. What it looks like I’m going to have to do is use Portia to
screen scrape the pages into a format that bbPress can ingest and let the
bbPress to Discourse script do the rest. So i might have to learn python
also.

That example would definitely help me though @riking. And huge thanks to
you @codinghorror.

[mochabcha (Channing Hinton)]

Yes we do need to set the settings for all the users, regardless of whether or not they are new users or not. All users should be set to mailing list mode. new users signing up won’t be that often so I can do that manually. I’ll also be importing all previous users from the old Google Groups so all users will be in the data base to where I can set the looper to adjust the settings.

[mochabcha (Channing Hinton)]

my apologies, this message was a bit late now that I’m looking at the site.

[alefattorini (Alessio Fattorini)]

@codinghorror Is it possible now? Or is still on your list? I need to setup email preferences for new users

[watchmanmonitor (Allen Hancock)]

@mochabcha @alefattorini

These two posts are of interest to you:

Set the defaults for new users:

Setting defaults to enable mailing list mode-Temporary Solution

Fix (clobber) all settings for all users (regardless of age, or if they’d already opted out, so I suggest this as a one-time only charge.

Edit a user setting for all Discourse users

[alefattorini (Alessio Fattorini)]

My Discourse is hosted :-\ so I can’t try your tips. Thank you anyway

[watchmanmonitor (Allen Hancock)]

So, two customers, me and @alefattorini are hoping to get confirmation that this is underway.

I was talking to another potential hosting customer today, but they too need to set the default for end users, cannot consider buying without this feature being built in.