Schedule Weekly Digest

[TorqueWrench]

Is there a way to schedule the weekly digest?

I was under the impression that the way Discourse’s digests worked was that on an individual user basis, the last visit time was recorded, and the digest would send X number of days after that point (i.e. 7 days in the case of the weekly digest). However, I’m not sure if that is still the case as, when I look at my sent emails, I’m seeing my weekly digests being sent all at once.

Unfortunately, those weekly digests are being sent at an off-hour and I think I could drive better user engagement if I were instead able to schedule the weekly digest. Is this possible?

Research I’ve Done:

Digests all sending at the same time

So I had an issue a long time ago where our digest emails stopped working for a extended period of time (I set the ‘suppress digest email after days’ value too high as I wanted to disable it, but this prevented all digest emails from sending). Now a huge amount of digest emails are clumped together and get sent out on the same day, at the same time. It’s quite a bit of a shotgun and SMTP providers are not a fan. I believe this also caused an issue where a large amount of bounced emails were re…

-This makes me think the weekly digest shouldn’t be behaving this way.

Digest email to be sent on schedule only

For slower VPS servers and bigger number of community members, sending digest emails may clutter sidekiq jobs queue. Combined with a possibly slow SMTP server and hight user activity at peak hours, this may lead to sidekiq get stuck, which will affect user “notifications” experience. I’d like to propose a setting to control during which hours sending queued digest emails can be executed. For many communities residing in a single country (e.g. Australia) or a single region (e.g. Europe), there…

-Post never received a response.

Thanks in advance,
TorqueWrench

[Falco]

@TorqueWrench

I was under the impression that the way Discourse’s digests worked was that on an individual user basis, the last visit time was recorded, and the digest would send X number of days after that point (i.e. 7 days in the case of the weekly digest). However, I’m not sure if that is still the case as

That is still the case.

Every 30 minutes we calculate users that are away for 7 days and send a digest.

What did change were some performance optimizations for sites that go days without new posts at

https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commit/c0293339b87c39bbd2b91f87e2d39179f40c9a9a

This can change the digest frequency, but will affect mostly communities in extremes, of either low new post or lots of users who doesn’t visit the site.

[TorqueWrench]

That explains it, thanks!

That’s my boat, as I use Discourse mainly as my comment provider.

There seems to be some interest in being able to schedule weekly digests (I can compile a list of other forum posts if you’d like), would this be something Discourse would be interested in? (Not committing you to development.) I think it would help alleviate a lot of the demand for the functionality requested here:

Any mass email functionality?

Am I just being silly in not being able to find it?

[Falco]

That is not in our roadmap, so your best bet is to commission a custom plugin for you at the #marketplace.