Notify users when a scheduled post is published

[waffleslop]

Use case: I use Discourse as a bit of an LMS, with lessons that “drip” twice a month. I build these lessons inside a category (“Lessons - Queue”) and then schedule them to auto-post to a student-visible category (“Lessons”).

When I have this auto-publish (which is really just moving a published topic from one category to another), I do not believe there is any notification sent to the students that a new lesson is available.

Barring using a tool like Mailchimp to send a notification out, or manually getting on the post and @All-Student commenting everyone, is there another way to automatically notify everyone of the post?

[bartv (Bart)]

You can set your ‘Lessons’ category to ‘default watching first post’ - this will send a notification to all your users when the scheduled post is moved into it:

After setting this option for your category, you can then also apply it to all your already existing users:

[waffleslop]

Thanks Bart!

Is there a way to schedule posts? For example, I want to schedule a 24-hour reminder post to say “be sure to join the live call at TIME at LINK”

Any option inside Discourse, or do I have to use an email tool like Mailchimp?

[Johani (Joe)]

Sure, have a look here

Use a Topic Timer to schedule a topic to be published in the future

Topic timers can be used to create a topic that can be scheduled to be published in the future at a later date. All timers can be used by staff (admin & moderators) as well as TL4 users Overview At a high level, these are steps to schedule a topic to be published in the future. Create a new topic and publish it to a private category Click the admin “wrench” icon next to the first post of the topic Select “Set Topic Timer…” Choose the publish time and select the category you would like it to a…

[downey (Michael Downey)]

@waffleslop Were you able to get this to work? We are trying to do the same thing but think there might be a new bug preventing it from happening.