The discussion revolves around the “Remove content of replies inside emails?” feature. duncancarver initially asked about hiding reply content in emails to encourage users to click back to the forum. codinghorror pointed out that this can be achieved by enabling the “private email” setting in site settings.
However, goodeas mentioned that this setting also hides topic titles, which they would like to display in email subjects. duncancarver agreed that the “private email” feature is not ideal, as it makes emails unclear.
sam questioned why leaking topic titles is acceptable but not body content. duncancarver explained that they want a “happy medium” setting that encourages users to return to the forum without revealing too much content.
sam suggested editing localizations as a possible solution. goodeas explained that their community requires sensitive content to be hidden, but topic titles are usually safe to display. sam advised that disabling digests might be the only option to prevent post content from being shown in emails.
I was wondering if there is a way to remove the content of replies inside emails, so rather than the whole reply to a post appear in an email, it would simply be the topic and a link back to the post - X user has posted a reply to the topic X - click here to check it out . That way users would be more inclined to click back onto the forum and continue discussion (instead of getting a complete answer in the email). Can’t seem to find any such setting to edit these emails in the admin area (I’m also keen to append a signature to these emails too if that’s possible).
Hi Jeff. We’re currently using the ‘private email’ setting on our instance because we don’t want the content of messages going out in notification emails. That’s perfect for the messages, however we would like to show the Topic title in the subject line of email, but I can’t see a way to achieve that. Is this possible somehow, or would you consider adding this as a feature? e.g. separate settings for private_email_message and private_email_topic_title?
Yeah, this feature isn’t that good, in fact I’m not sure I see a purpose for it really.
If you switch to private, you literally get an email where you have no idea what it’s about, no topic title (a topic ID instead, not that that’s going to be any good to a forum member), nothing describing it in the body of the email - the topic title and then a link for example “someone has replied to “topic title” click here to check it out”.
I turned this private feature back off as it’s even worse than sending an email with all content included inside it.
Would be really nice to be able to edit the actual components of the emails that go out to select what information you do want to include but looks like that’s not an option.
I guess what I’m looking for is a happy medium “in the middle” setting.
I guess I can see why a fully private email might be useful for certain circumstances.
However, if I’m running a public forum, I want people / members to keep returning as much as possible. If they are getting the full content of other peoples replies to the topic they’re subscribed to, within the emails, they’re less likely to come back to the site to view them and continue the conversation (if you don’t have the reply by email option enabled I mean).
So there’s a less likely chance they might continue the conversation in the forum and/or make new posts whilst they’re there helping to expand the forum posts and other discussions etc.
In such a case, just including the title of the topic and a little message saying new replies have been made in the email body, click here to check them out… would encourage them back. Something editable would be awesome.
The private setting seems to be an extreme version of doing this and doesn’t work well for the above scenario as people getting those emails (general forum users) aren’t even going to be able to figure out why they’re getting them i.e. it mentions a topic ID in the title which really means nothing to them.
Sam, in our case, it’s a closed (not public) community of medical professionals, sometimes discussing sensitive cases etc, so we don’t want any content/details in the body of notification emails, but the topic titles rarely have any sensitive content. I have been asked if I can show the topic titles in the notification emails because members are more interested in responding quickly to some topic more than others, but they currently can’t tell by just the Topic #ID in the subject.
I also thought of disabling the ‘private email’ setting and editing the email templates instead, but there are several of them - I’m not sure if that would cover all cases - and there doesn’t seem to be a ‘digest’ email template(?) so I’m concerned that would still show the post contents.