I can completely agree to that. My use case is quite like the one of @mcwumbly.
But I’m willing to try @codinghorror’s idea to have a ‘faster’ digest mail option. I’d say every three hours.
That would equal about four times in a working day. If people want to check their mail more often they can check the forum themselves.
OK, good to know!
Will be interested to hear how it works for you…
For me, in the end, I might be more interested in things like potentially getting hooks to push notifications into a HipChat room, desktop or mobile notification (probably plug-in territory)
I’m afraid this is above my exp level to submit a PR. Will this be added?
It would be a big help to have, cause my forum users get crazy of all the mails they get just for every single reply to a topic they are not reading. All they want is an (almost) immediate notification of a new topic in a certain category.
This digest solution is not really what we’re looking for, but it gets close. Thing is that the digest also puts in all other topics of other categories and we just want to subscribe to new topics in a certain category (without replies).
@neil can we try having a faster digest option? How much work would it be to change the time intervals here and have an “every 6 hours” option in addition to never, daily, weekly, every two weeks …?
Sorry for the delay, this is on my list. We can change the digest_after_days column in the users table to be digest_after_hours, and then it’s a simple change.
I hate to bump, but I’d love this option. 
Oops, my todo list has failed me again.
Long term, I think we should support more aggressive digest settings, e.g. every hour, or even every 30 minutes.
To me it is vastly preferable to get a rollup email every hour that says “hey, 6 new topics posted” than 6 individual notification emails about 6 topics created in the last hour.
@neil is working on this now and shared an in progress screenshot
Hey everyone, look I did it. As the screenshot shows, a couple more options have been added to get digest options more frequently. I will live with “every 30 minutes” to see how I like it for a while.
A few clarifications:
digest will not send if it has nothing to send you (seems obvious, but, see next point)
TL0 users are excluded from digests as a safety measure: no topics or replies created by TL0 will ever be included in a digest
Can this be made a user setting? For a site that does support, many new topics might be from brand new, first day users, who are TL0, and have a legitimate concern that people would likely want to see in their email.
This would be very useful for groups too. I need to know about new group messages, but once someone starts dealing with them I don’t need to get notified of followups anymore (unless of course I am the one dealing with it, but that’s already solved for per-post notifications)
I tried out the 30 minute setting for a bit… not my tempo.
I think 1 hour will be too much too.
I think what I’d really like is the ability to get a digest once a day even if I do visit the site. Maybe that’s a different feature, but I’m not sure… there’s a lot of overlap here the more frequent we allow someone to receive these things.
Given the original reason for adding the more frequent digest options, I think showing TL0 posts in digests should be supported somehow. But for most people who are only getting digests weekly, TL0 posts should still be excluded. Maybe TL0 posts should only be shown if you’ve opted in to multiple digests per day, and chosen to see TL0 posts.
I’m getting digests every 30 minutes from meta right now, and in practice I don’t actually get one every 30 minutes. While I’m on the site, I won’t get a digest because there’s nothing new for me. During the night, there are periods of 3 hours sometimes where a digest isn’t sent. I like the feel of it so far, but if it included all TL0 topics it might lose its curated feel. A per-user option to “include topics from new users in digests” might solve it.
Good idea… let’s live with this a week longer and then decide on some tweaks.
I don’t see digest option in Udacity’s Discourse instance. Is this live yet?
My end goal is as follows.
Thanks.
