Subscribe to a topic by email in a "watching first post" channel

feature
1

Is there way to subscribe a topic’s replies by email?

Scenario: I’m “watching first post” in a channel. I see something I like. I reply “watch” (or “subscribe” or click a “follow” link etc), and am subscribed to replies to that single topic.

I understand that if I reply to it with a comment or “+1” I’ll be subscribed, but is there a way to subscribe without “liking” it?

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2

Use the notification control on the topic to set your notification level for the topic. It is visible both near the timeline and at the bottom of the topic.

You will only be emailed about notifications if the website has not seen you active in a web browser in the last 10 minutes.

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Sorry to be clearer: is there a way to subscribe by email without liking it?

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The answer remains the same. Use the topic notification level control — that has nothing to do with “liking”. Whether or not you get an email depends on whether your web browser touched the website in the last 10 minutes.

5

I love you and your work dearly, but this doesn’t address the question.

Q: “Can I do x by email?”
A: “You can do x by visiting the website.”

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I do not understand your question, sorry.

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I think I understand - You’re asking if there are ways of changing the notification control through email only by a special reply (similar to “+1” response).

There is currently no “special” reply by email to subscribe without liking or responding; For that action it’s only available through the web app, but it is a nice suggestion.

EDIT: TIL, this is possible (below). Even while following Discourse’s development pretty closely I still miss some of these real cool ninja features!

6 Likes
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I can’t speak to exactly what the OP was thinking of, but it would make sense to me that if you have turned on the Watching First Post mode for a category, then the email could include a button/link to directly watch the topic. Underneath the Visit Topic button maybe there could be another saying “Watch this topic to be sent emails for all replies.”

Screenshot of notification email

Perhaps there could also be a little explanation sentence in the footer too: “You received this email because someone replied to you/you are watching the topic/you are watching the category/you have requested notifications for new posts in this category.”

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I don’t think that’s entirely true, @sam added some kind of ninja expert mode magic email reply command words but I don’t know where they are documented.

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10

Yeah this is not documented. You can reply with the word watch to watch a topic and mute to mute a topic.

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11

Ok this request makes more sense now @eddowding there you go ↑ ↑ ↑

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12

Boom! Sorry for the dealy - had to be afk for a few.

This is exactly what I was after, thank you @sam for the code and @Dannii for the translation :slight_smile:

So next related question: is it possible to insert a link? I know we can edit templates, but does that email customisation have access to the reply key? So href=mailto:[reply-key]@[domain]?subj=[subj]&body=watch ?

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Unfortunately after reading through https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/19e3b3b1bce96787e27dd59c424605a43c7bf5db/lib/email/message_builder.rb I don’t think you have a reply-key or even reply email address discrete var to use.

Maybe for the first few month add a generic link for “Getting the best out of your email experience” and add that to the bottom of all the emails. You can put a full cheat sheet there including explaining about various user settings etc.

3 Likes
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Checking to see if there is any development update on the reply* option for email addresses. Also would be awesome way to allow people to reply to specific on-going topics via email.

Any further documentation on this? Would it be possible for me to replace watch with subscribe?

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15

Just coming back to this, I see that these options are possible:

  • +1 or like : likes the post
  • watch : watches the topic
  • track : tracks the topic
  • mute : mutes the topic

Is there any update on if it’s possible to configure those as clickable links within the email wrapper template so it will generate a mailto: with the reply key? (So href=mailto:[reply-key]@[domain]?subj=[subj]&body=watch)

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This is super old, but wondering if there had been any change so that a suitably crafted email could be used to track a topic.

Our use case is there are some users who despite much cajoling, explaining and telling just cannot seem to watch important topics that we use as de-factor mailing lists.

It would be great to have a simple mailto link that they could click to subscribe to a topic. Note that they don’t currently get sent emails from that topic, so can’t reply to it.

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17

This has been requested before here: Change notification level with a link

But there hasn’t been any movement on the feature, unfortunately.

1 Like