Instant notification for every new topic/reply

Hi guys. I was thinking about working on a Pull Request to expand Discours’ functionality to allow users to opt-in to receive notification for new topics and replies as they are posted much like a true mailing list.

The reason for this is that, for smaller communities, mailing lists work great because members get to see discussion happen live-fire without needing to constantly have discourse open in their browser. My meetup used a mailing list successfully on RubyForge for years until they closed and we were force to find an alternative solution for discussion. We decided to go with discourse but we are really missing that no-action-needed form of lurking that Mailing-lists provides for some users.

My reason for opening this topic is, do you guys feel that this goes against Discours’ current email notification style?

Do you think discourse could handle sending email in this manner to users who have opted-in for dicourse to spam their email box?

You already have mailing list mode for this, just enable it in site settings.

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So the only difference between this and the current mailing-list-mode is that the notifications are subject to the 10-minute on-the-site delay?

I thought these were the people that wanted a record of every message in their email.

EDIT: Oh, is this like what I just tried to set up in the last few days - tracking every topic?

I thought we decided to enable this by default (as a checkbox in the user prefs) Sam? I see no downside and it is one less setting to mess with.

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Yeah, we did, just checked it in.

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This is a great start, but I wouldn’t call the notifications “instant” though. In my few-day-old install, it seems to be around 5-10 minutes before the notification goes out. Is there any way to make that a little more “instant”?

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Oh wow! The work is already done for me! Mission accomplished :open_mouth:

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Is there any way to have that option enabled by default for users who sign up?

I haven’t tried changing this myself, but I believe the setting you’re looking for is email_time_window_mins. It looks like 10 minutes and the setting description says “How many minutes we wait before sending reply notification emails, to give users a chance to edit and finalize their posts”

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A little bit off, not sure if deserves a new topic:

How about “instant email me button”?

I’m just setting up a new discourse forum and being in a sandbox I’d like to hit a button and receive an email for a topic I created so I could test if the “reply via email” is working. A “force/provoke instant notification” button would have been great for me right now.

Then I thought maybe this could be an useful feature for someone. No idea why, though! :stuck_out_tongue:

In any case, any suggestions for me testing it out?