Hi and thank you very much for this great software. I am currently setting up a Discourse server for an open-source Android project. On Google Play, you have to specify a contact email address. My idea is to use this address to post to Discourse automatically, so that the whole community can do email support. This already works great (Discourse creates staged users).
I am now looking for a way to automatically send a message to new staged users. The reason is that, when sending the email, users might not expect that their email will be visible publicly. I am thinking about something like this:
Thank you for contacting us. We posted your request in our support community forum. Our volunteers are happy to help you. If you want to delete the post, click here.
The perfect solution (but probably harder) would be to send a confirmation mail to staged users before posting for the first time. This would also help to prevent spam. Something like this:
Thank you for contacting us. Support is managed by volunteers in our forum. We already created a post for you but it is not visible yet. Click here to make it visible and receive replies. If you ignore this message, we will not email you again.
This is basically the reverse of this topic:
Is there already a way to do that? Thank you very much for your reply!
Hello and welcome to our community. Glad to have you here.
If you are familiar with web hooks, I think you could probably set one up to fire an email when staged users are created.
That said, you may want to rethink your workflow which I think runs counter to the way discourse is intended to operate… the more you go with the flow the less pain you will go through setting up and running your community. Also, having an “opt out” rather than an “opt in” process is counter to GDPR and other privacy laws, and generally how people expect their email address to be treated.
I don’t know what kinds of support questions people are going to get on your site, but I’d suspect that most of them won’t be suitable for public sharing anyway. Better to have your volunteers respond directly to requests and then glean the learnings to share and put them in a FAQ or start a public topic on a case by case basis.
A really easy way to make this happen is to create a discourse group for a triage team of volunteers, have the email delivered to the group which creates the staged user. Then your volunteers can respond to the email and follow up as needed. As part of that the person can be informed about your forum and be encouraged to join in the public discussions.
Good point. So it looks like staged users do not fit in our case.
Currently, support is done using Google Groups. Most questions are along the lines of “X does not work” or “Please add Y” - so they are mostly uncritical for publishing. The number of volunteers is pretty small, unfortunately. I was hoping that a public forum could help anyone to reply and to reduce my work load. Having a triage group would effectively increase my work load because it makes it impossible for casual users to reply.
I guess I will continue to use the ugly workaround that I currently use: Have an auto-responder for the support email address that just tells users to post on the forum instead. Maybe the badges and better UI of Discourse (in comparison to Google Groups) will convince some casual users to become more active and reply to other user’s support requests.
Again, thanks a lot for your reply. Discourse is great
