I’ve been working on trying to start my own Discourse community for a local sports league, and I’m facing a great deal of trouble with trying to get people to check the forums and use them.
I’m finding that if I get a user signed up for push notifications and create posts that trigger a push to them, they will come back and check the forums.
However, email notifications (such as digests and etc) are going unread because most do not actively check their email.
I think the norm nowadays is that people expect to receive a push notification straight to their phone’s homescreen when an event occurs that demands their attention.
Nobody has their email set up to generate push notifications though, so the only time people will really check their email is when they’re expecting to receive one.
Unfortunately, this means that all of the great work the Discourse team has done to draw people back (such as activity digests) is completely ineffective because this is routed via email.
So I think the ask is pretty simple: push notifications should be generated in addition to emails.
And I think there might be a very simple way to implement this:
You could convert emails into PMs from Discobot so that they generate both a push and email notification.
And then, for the people arriving from a push notification, they can open the PM and get the full notification that they would’ve received in their email inbox.
Can you describe in a bit more detail what you’re doing today?
I think these real world examples about what is and isn’t working well for you and others could be quite informative, both immediately to others who might experiment with similar things, and to us in thinking about the design of any feature inspired by what you’re proposing here.
I’m also interested in your examples to understand how you’re thinking of what is worthy of a push notification vs. what is not.
How do you encourage people to sign up for push notifications? What kinds of posts are you making that trigger notifications? Who do you send them to? How often are you sending them?
Yes! I’ve set up a few categories on my forums so that all users are notified about the first post (announcements, events and parties).
I also occasionally create topics in the general category and directly @ the people I want to include in the conversation.
In each scenario, email notifications are generated and delivered, but only the people with a background in tech will check the forums based on an email notification.
And even the people who do check their emails are lazy about it and only do so occasionally.
After making that observation, I’ve taken an aggressive strategy in getting people signed up for push notifications (where I’ve been walking them through the process in-person).
For those who are successfully signed up (i.e. they have an entry in the push_notifications table), when they receive a push notification they do come back and check the forums.
Unfortunately there isn’t a good way for me to automate this or scale up without modifying Discourse.
I’d strongly prefer if users were prompted to set up push notifications in the onboarding wizard
I personally think that every email notification is worthy of a push notification - and that is probably because I literally have my email set up to send me push notifications.
And I know - I’m probably the only person in the world who does this
How-to posts and constantly asking people to enable notifications.
Apple made this extremely difficult with iOS so I have to explain to non-technical people how to install the forums as a PWA. It’s extremely annoying.
I found this though - it’s much better at pushing people to install the forums (and I’d probably install this if it were a Discourse plugin/theme component).
Also - at one point when I walked through this with 3 different people, I observed a bug where the notification consent banner did not actually sign them up for notifications (there was no entry for them in the push_notifications table).
I don’t have a good way to debug this and it takes the same code path as the settings page (so you’d think it would work), so I held off on reporting it.
It sounds like there are really a couple things for us to consider here:
Guiding / nudging people to enable push notifications
Sending push notifications for more things
And stepping back, as you mentioned initially the general problem you’re highlighting here is “how do we more effectively reach people who want to be notified when they are not currently active on the site?
I could imagine some other approaches to that problem aside from push notifications, but I think it’s a reasonable thing to reach for.
There is some tension with our desire to not put undue demands upon people’s attention and to allow people to participate in discussions asynchronously, when it’s a good time for them, rather than create a sense of urgency.
So I think going into this direction would certainly also require:
Giving people more control over what they receive push notifications for, with sensible defaults
Push notifications are the thing that I’m familiar with, but I think that if you were to take this idea in an abstract form, it’d be something like:
How can Discourse move from legacy/deprecated forms of notification (e-mail) and toward modern forms of notification (push).
I agree with you that not everything needs to be presented urgently as a push notification - after all, we’re not trying to create yet another addictive application.
However, the world has moved away from poll-based notification and toward push-based notification, and I think the behavior I’m observing from my users reflects that.
