Set "default email digest frequency" to 3-4 days

Feature
1

I’d like to send the activity summary email to my users about every half-week (3 or 4 days). I don’t see an option to do so in the UI. Is there another way of setting this up.

We’ve found that one week is too long if someone has asked a question or is looking for feedback, but think that once a day might be too noisy for most people. Our forum caters to groups with divergent interests.

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2

The site settings of interest is default email digest frequency but as you may have seen it only has a dropdown with frequency options of daily, weekly, monthly, etc.

Each of the frequency option are translated to a number of minutes, so selecting the weekly option sets the site setting value to 10,080. For the 3-4 days you mentioned you probably want to set it to something like 5,040.

I thought I’d be able to use Postman & the API and change it through there since the specific value isn’t exposed by the interface.

But i tried to use

https://example-forum-name.com/admin/site_settings/default_email_digest_frequency?default_email_digest_frequency=5040&update_existing_user=true

& received an error response

{
    "errors": [
        "value"
    ]
}

So now I’m kind of curious as well if theres another way around this or potentially some reason why the options for this setting are limited

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3

@Discourse

Is there any plan to add custom days or a half-week option for activity summary emails? Our community is in a similar position to @alehandrof. I think in general allowing custom frequencies to be entered would be super valuable

Thanks!

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I’m in agreement here! - is there any chance of adding a "every 3 days” option for activity summary emails? Daily is too frequent and Weekly is leaving it too long…

What do we need to do to get this actioned? It it purely about the number of people that comment on this post?

Seems like such an easy but really important change!

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For it to be adopted as a core feature, it would be roughly based on how popular a request it is and whether there’s capacity to prioritise it.

For some, it may be possible to commission a freelancer in the marketplace if the feature is possible through a plugin.

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7

OK, fair enough. Obviously there’s a fair few other people asking for the same change over here too:

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8

+1 for this feature request.

Maybe @JammyDodger can merge these topics to get better counts.

Perhaps if need be we could see if ppl are interested in pooling together to sponsor a plugin

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My instance of Discourse is on a managed hosting platform and I can’t install new plug-ins. I can install theme components, if it could be done that way?

Searching around a bit, I see that there was a “every three days” option until 2019, until it was removed, seemingly without much consultation/considertion:

There’s also another vote for a 3 day option in that topic too:

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11

I would also LOVE to have this option.

Sending the digest emails every 3-4 days or every half-week would be extremely helpful for us.

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12

Definitely has my +1 - it really is the sweet spot for many small to mid-sized communities.

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13

I’m the OP, and I just wanted to mention that our community would still appreciate this feature and would happily change to the frequency to 3-4 days, if it was possible!

In the topic linked earlier @sam suggests that being able to send the digest Monday & Friday would be a great option, though it was out of scope at the time.

I actually think that defining the day would be the best solution for us. We’d use Monday & Thursday, though. Our community is international and some folks have a weekend on Saturday-Sunday, while some have it on Friday-Saturday.

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14

Just as a spitball suggestion, we now have the AI Summaries that can be generated on a regular schedule using the AI + Automation plugins (ours here on meta forum summaries).

I’m wondering if Watching/subscribing to that topic would fulfil a similar function as an activity summary? (May need some tweaking to perfect the idea)

Though the activity summary does have extra magic to make it specific, so perhaps not quite yet.

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That’s a great idea. I hadn’t even thought of it, but now that you brought it up, the ability to specify which day(s) the digests go out would be hugely helpful.

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16

@lindsey might be worth thinking about reviewing the “email digest frequency” options now that we’ve fixed how often they’re sent.

Any options “shorter” than a day feels like too fast…
Maybe “half-week” makes more sense?

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20

‘Half-Week’ would be awesome!

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