Among other things, we use our Discourse to handle committee work. A meeting organizer wants to follow-up with 23 people from a recent meeting. What’s the most effective way to handle this?
We have the list of names and email addresses of participants. Copy-pasting them in Gmail works, obviously, and is our fall back. But we’d like to encourage use of Discourse for this kind of discussion. All participants have Discourse accounts already.
What would happen if we just paste the emails into the recipients dialog. Would Discourse realize that these folks have accounts and message them appropriately?
(I could create a group, but these folks came together for this one planning meeting and it is unlikely they will meet again soon in this form, so I’d like to avoid creating a group if possible.)
The only other solution I see is typing the name of each person individually.
Please correct me if I am wrong. Discourse does recognise but I believe you need reply by email enabled on the site. I’m unsure if this creates a PM on the forum or sends the user an email.
If you want you can just add the names in. You shouldn’t have to type the whole username as discourse shows you some prompts of what the username could be.
Is the meeting organizer a staff member? Allowing non staff to paste emails and perform a lookup would violate security for users who keep a private email address (from other members).
The meeting organizer is an admin and he really needed to send the message out yesterday, so he just added all 23 people by hand (typing their name and waiting for the dialog to appear and so on). I’m sure he won’t be excited to do this again, so some kind of improved UX here would be welcome.
A little bit of background: We usually have meeting data (names & emails) from Zoom’s registration. Typically we use Airtable’s SendGrid integration for follow-up messages (link to the recording, useful resources, etc.). In this case, we wanted to have a follow-up conversation to decide next step steps about something.
So, the question can be generalized thusly: what’s a good way of going from a list of emails to a PM in Connect (to avoid using email as a “discussion platform”). For our case, anyone who would need to do this would either be an admin, or of sufficient responsibility in the org that I’d be happy to give them staff rights. So hopefully that removes the legal issue.
More background: When folks sign up to our website they give us consent to share their emails with other members of our higher education consortium for the purposes of event follow-ups, developing collaborations, etc. We realized while we were retooling our processes for GDPR that these are such common use cases for us that we had request this upfront. But obviously this won’t be the case in most Discourse sites.
Pasting usernames, as Jeff suggested, would be a helpful feature but not one that would serve us in this case.
