Email Newsletter For Forum Members

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Hello,

I currently run a fairly popular forum which has been established for quite a few years, I’m considering moving over to Discourse.

I’m wondering if there is an email newsletter function to Discourse? We currently run a weekly email newsletter which covers some of the weeks best topics, forum information, interesting articles ect through our current forum software. I wondered if this is possible through Discourse?

In an ideal world I’d like forum members to be automatically added to an outside email newsletter service such as Mailchimp or Aweber automatically on signup. (importing the email list weekly isn’t a good solution).

Does such a feature or extension exist that can do this?

Thanks in advance!

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This has been asked for several times, but I don’t think anyone’s ever done it. Keep in mind this caveat if the user doesn’t explicitly opt-in to such a list:

https://meta.discourse.org/t/get-a-list-of-all-emails-and-or-sync-with-mailchimp/16581/2?u=downey

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A double opt-in once signed up would cover this I believe? Especially if the double opt in email (for example from Mailchimp) specifically stated they were joining a weekly forum newsletter.

Or maybe there could be some sort of email newsletter checkbox when signing up to the forum so people can specifically decide if they want this or not.

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Better not rely on me for legal advice here. :slight_smile:

However, in my ideal scenario, there would be a custom field in the Discourse user profile (user-maintainable later on) for opt-in/out, which would be available at sign-up and user preferences, and update Mailchimp (or whatever) with their preference when changed.

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I’ve done it before using WP SSO and auto-adding people to a Mailchimp list when they sign up.

We didn’t explicitly ask for permission to go onto the list but we only sent community related emails with a clear unsubscribe link on each and a note saying they were getting the emails because they signed up to the community.

You can see it in action if you sign up at experts.feverbee.com – you’ll get an automated onboarding series that comes from Mailchimp.

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That’s interesting, it may be a quick fix. Although I wasn’t intending to use Wordpress it makes me think twice about that choice.

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@HAWK
I just checked the feverbee site - and that’s exactly what I want to do.

Could you please share the steps of implementation?

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I can’t sorry – it was done as part of an entire site rebuild so I used a third party dev team.

I’m happy to introduce you to them via email if that’s helpful. I highly recommend them.

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Another way would be to use a webhook to trigger new user emails. Until recently, it was not possible to distinguish between a new user event and other user events, but now:

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