"Like" button or link for email notifications

Feature
1

On investigating some of our email-based replies that are below the default 20-character threshold, many of them are for short responses of affirmation, e.g. “sounds fine to me”, etc.

As I understand it, the character limit is designed to avoid just those type of responses in topics. One way to avoid user anger at the character limitation when they use email would be to include a link or button that would enable people to “like” the post for which they’re being notified.

That way, the user doesn’t have to struggle come up with some type of reply over 20 character minimum, and can voice their approval in 1 a single from their email client.

Thoughts?

2 Likes
2

Can you mock up what you think this would look like?

3

Quick idea …

likemail.png1328×654 27.5 KB

2 Likes
4

Should it be a link or a reply with a specific syntax? We could make it so
all email replies of under X chars are implicit likes.

5

Consider also checking this feature request:

2 Likes
6

This could be troublesome if the reply is “rubbish!” or something like that. :smile:

The suggestion from @DeanMarkTaylor would be probably be OK too, as long as there were instructions to do so, perhaps in the footer. Or the footer could be something like:

To like this post, reply with the single word “like” or click here.

7

I prefer to “reply” in a mail client as mentioned in the reply to like…

All these additional steps feel wrong:

  1. Click the link
  2. Opening a web browser
  3. Visual for like action taking place
  4. Having to return to mail client
  5. Delete the mail.

The reply process would be simpler especially for mobile clients (arguably the target group for mail reply functionality):

  1. Click reply
  2. Type “like” or “+1” or similar.
  3. Hit send (depending on the mail client this also closes / archives the email conversation).

In addition the link is effectively an instruction - which was the complaint with other proposal - “how would users know”.

3 Likes
8

What if the link was this or similar?

mailto:reply+5fecXXXXXXXXXXXXXX1f@discourse.org?subject=Like+post+25499-6&body=like

The account would be pulled from the reply key, and the post number from the subject.

1 Like
9

This would help quite a bit, making our discourse/email list much more like a web-forum.