I’d like to see an option in the preferences to “always send digests” at the desired frequency no matter what, even if the user has been on the forum recently. I’ve been seeing what is sent to others from my discourse on mandrill and am feeling jealous! Even if I’ve been visiting it does not mean I am up to date on all the discussions, and I am sometimes sloppy about wrapping up loose ends, so I’d like to get the newsletter anyway.
What happened to this option? I was just asked about precisely this issue by someone in my community and now see that the settings available changed at some point.
We are in the process of trying to identify the “ideal settings” for email notifications for our community which we migrated to discourse from google groups. We are trying to encourage people to participate online but because we are a global network with people in “internet-remote” places, email remains key, and digests seem to be the only way to ensure people are informed of all the latest activity.
Here’s the request I got which is pretty concise. Any advice much appreciated.
@tobiaseigen what if I want to get emails of every new post, but only in certain categories? I can’t seem to find how to do that. The only way I see is to receive email for every new post, and mute the categories I don’t want every email for. But then, those muted categories don’t show up in the new or unread columns when I log into the website.
I’d ideally like my workflow to be as follows:
- get emails for everything that goes out to all staff and to leadership categories.
- for all other categories, I want to go to the website and check my “unread” and “new” tabs.
Finally, I tried to sign up for email digests but have been disappointed that I’m not getting any, presumably because I visit the forum. I still want the digests for my records, so I at least know there is one place where I can look back for stuff I know I’ve seen. Just because I drop by the site does not mean I’m reading everything thoroughly, and getting a digest gives me a second chance to catch up. (For this reason, I prefer not to suppress emails while on the site – although I know marena loves and uses that feature!) I vote for receiving digests regardless of appearances on the forum. But I also acknowledge that it may be a quirky personal preference, so we should go with what works for most people.
The option is still there for notifications, but the digest in particular won’t mail you unless you have been inactive.
Thanks, @codinghorror - appreciate the explanation. Is there a way to bring this back? Perhaps with an admin selectable option for those sites that still want to offer the option to get digests even when you’ve been active?
Bring what back? It never existed.
I did some research on this last week and forgot to reply. It appears that yes, you are right, that it was never possible to get digests even when active on the site. With best of intentions, @BhaelOchon sent me on a wild goose chase. 
What would it take to add a feature to allow digest delivery for active users? My globally dispersed, email centric community is feeling the weight of information overload. People are tuning out discourse and are ignoring the important notifications about topics they are mentioned in or involved in. When they do log in they ignore the notifications bubble and feel lost. This despite repeated reminders directly and through documentation on the forum.
Providing an email digest of latest activity would go a long way to coaxing these people into our new, discourse way of doing things. As my colleague wrote, she needs a reminder email and a “second chance” to catch up on discussions:
Finally, I tried to sign up for email digests but have been disappointed that I’m not getting any, presumably because I visit the forum. I still want the digests for my records, so I at least know there is one place where I can look back for stuff I know I’ve seen. Just because I drop by the site does not mean I’m reading everything thoroughly, and getting a digest gives me a second chance to catch up.
2 Likes
@codinghorror Is there a way to get this feature. Essentially we want to disable per topic notification and enable an uniform weekly digest for all community members even when they are active in the forum. This has been requested many times.
1 Like
@codinghorror has made it pretty clear he’s not interested in sending digests to people who log in, and it never worked that way.
So I suspect this is plugin territory.
The workaround is for admins to send out weekly digests to everyone manually - the digest preview is pretty amazing for making this quick and easy to do. Adding a group/username filter to the preview to see what real world users actually would see if they got the digest would make this incredible feature even more useful!
1 Like
Can you elaborate on this please?
just go to the digest preview on the admin, select range, copy-paste into mailchimp, tweak, send.
2 Likes
Thanks, I was afraid that was the answer.
it sounds like this must be obvious but i’m afraid I can’t find this. any more clues?
EDIT - Ahhh. Cleverly hiding in plain sight! 
1 Like
Hello everyone, I know it’s an old topic, but I reallly would love to have this feature for my community. Is there a plugin or setting to always sending digest even when the user have been ont th forum?
Doing it manuelly wont be as acurete as the automatic digest, because it wont send the actual notifications or not read topics for everyone.
Or I fund a solution, every saturday morning, setting it to sending digest every 30 min, but doesn’t seems to work.
2 Likes
You’d need a plugin that overrides the time of last visit (or something like that, I’d have to look at the code).
2 Likes