The discussion revolves around a feature request to add support for curated topics in Digest emails, allowing admins or moderators to include selected topics in digest notifications, potentially as a newsletter-style publication Ric. ToddZ highlights that Digest emails are personalized and sent based on user preferences, unlike a traditional newsletter sent to all users at once. They suggest alternatives such as using the Discourse Newsletter Integration plugin or creating a dedicated newsletter topic Ric. Ric mentions privacy concerns with Mailchimp due to regulatory and GDPR compliance issues, prompting exploration of self-hosted solutions like Listmonk and Sendportal, which offer privacy-focused options ToddZ.
It would be really cool if admin’s or moderators could maintain a list of curated topics that get included in the digest emails. This would allow them to be used as a newsletter style publication.
We may need to also consider a setting limits for the number of curated topics included in that section of the email template.
The digest/summary function is pretty different under the hood from a newsletter, though. It’s not sent to everyone at a specific time – it’s individually created and sent to each user, based on the interval set in their preferences, and only if they don’t visit the forum in that time.
I’d imagine you’d want a curated newsletter to go out to everybody, with the same content, at the same time – not in a week or a month or whatever the user has selected (or not be sent at all, if the user visits the site frequently.)
A couple of options you could look at, if you haven’t already:
I might look into listmonk.app we can’t use mailchimp at work because of privacy concerns as we work in a regulated industry, also I’m not sure it GDRP compliant either.
I know GDPR is tricky, but I’d imagine any prominent tools are taking it into account today.
Listmonk seems to have good privacy options:
Another self-hosted open source solution is https://sendportal.io/. There’s an indication here that features include GDPR compliance, but I haven’t dug for details.
