Digests fire very quickly in a slow forum

[watchmanmonitor (Allen Hancock)]

On of the forms I manage is a slow moving on, mostly for dissemination of information. Many people are on digest, and if there isn’t a post for one week, I’m seeing discourse JUMP on the first post as if it was the most important thing.

What this results in is people on a digest of 3 or 7+ days getting just the first post, then getting the rest of the follow ups 3-7+ days later, depending on their digest settings.

I think the following is what I’m after, but don’t know what else it would effect:

Repro:

1. Run a forum with sporadic activity.
2. Have users on a 3 day digest
3. Wait as 3+ days go by.
4. As a topic is created/updated, watch as the first post triggers the digest email
5. Digest users may login right away, but there’s nothing more.
6. Notice that people active on the site, or in mailing list mode reply & interact with the site.
7. digest users won’t get another email for 3+ days (depending on their settings)

What I’m wishing was that there was a bit more of a buffer between the one post triggering a digest that essentially mutes the forum for days, after just one post comes by. Maybe an admin setting of digest delay?

In our specific case, the forum is moderated, so I may go and release 3-4 posts at a time, but only the first one is emailed out, while the others are stale. In that case, knowing I could put a 1 hour delay would allow me to approve a number of posts, knowing at they will all go out in a single digest.

Thoughts?

[tophee (Christoph)]

This is a very old question and possibly no longer relevant, but since I noticed the same phenomenon on one of my forums, I have thought about this and concluded that the thing here is that in this specific case of a “slow forum” digests become more or less indistinguishable from notification emails and that’s why you might complain about people not getting notified about posts.

So the way to solve this is to make sure people understand that they need to watch relevant categories (or just make them watch by default). Digests are digests and doing their job as digests just fine.