I’ve converted an existing mailing list to Discourse quite successfully, but I’m struggling slightly with the best way to do something. This is for a running club, and we would often send email announcing a race or event, and then, a few days later, resend that email as a reminder (or more often, reply to it with a little “Just wanted to make sure everyone knows this race is coming up.” line at the top and the original post below).
In Discourse, I’ve set up an Announcements forum that everyone is set to Watching First Post, so that ensures that everyone is notified of the initial announcement post. But I can’t figure out how to, in essence, resend that post. I also have an “important” tag that I can affix to any post to ensure everyone is notified, but without creating a new post that’s a duplicate of the original (which would be confusing), I can’t see any way to get that notification to happen.
Right, I understand the difference between Watching First Post and Watching in general.
Just setting our Announcements forum to Watching won’t work, though, because if we post a race announcement, for instance, someone is going to reply to that email with a question that may be perfectly legitimate but shouldn’t be pushed out to 600+ people. (Worse, what has also happened is that people receive the first post, and reply to it as way of sending a thought-to-be-private message to the sender.) There are a lot of non-technical people in this group, and experience has already shown that there’s no way they’re going to understand the consequences of various actions.
That’s why what I’m looking for is a way that I, as an admin or at least privileged user, can cause a post to be “sent again” as one would do in email.
Yeah, my suggestion would only work if you prevented everyone except staff (or a core group) to reply to the Announcements Topic.
People could still use the interface to reply as a linked Topic btw, but I’m pretty sure that wouldn’t work over email.
What you are asking for seems to be a modification of notification regime for ‘Watching first post’ which will also push out notifications for new staff posts. That’s plugin territory!
Or just the ability for an admin to designate a post as worthy of notification. I can do that with the “important” tag in categories that don’t have Watching First Post required.
Hmm, what if the topic was moved to another category and then back? I wonder if that would trigger it as a new first post?
Good point. How about you get the users to watch a ‘reminder’ tag? I’ve never tried it but perhaps notifications go out after you’ve added this later in the Topic’s life. Test it?
The additional thing to test is if a user gets notified of staff tags. If that’s the case then you can restrict who can add those tags to prevent abuse.
Hmm, I’ll have to think about how I can build a test that won’t alert everyone accidentally. I do have a test category that only I’m in, with several accounts, so that may provide a sufficient test bed.
Thanks for the ideas—good to know I’m not missing anything obvious, at least.
Hi Adam – I’m curious where you ended up re. this old issue. I’ve recently raised basically the same question and got some answers over here.
I’m now puttering (in that thread) with a rails script that can trigger notifications for a pre-existing topic, but I’m struggling to get the corresponding email to work 100%.
Just wondering if you found a way, or chose a workaround, or …?
I never got around to testing the various possibilities because it turned out that there was usually something that needed to change in the original post for the second reminder anyway. So we just create another post that’s similar but not identical to the first one, and that goes out properly with Watching First Post.
I do have a test category that only I’m in, with several accounts, so that may provide a sufficient test bed.