We are migrating away from phpBB for a small forum for internal use in our company. One feature of phpBB that we’ve come to rely on is to minimize email notifications for a topic by not sending an update email if the user hasn’t actually read the latest posts on the topic.
I’m hoping that there is a way to get this behavior, but based on my reading of past posts, I’m not seeing it.
Note: This is a different scenario than what is covered here: Get notified of new topics, but not posts - we want our users to watch every topic in a category. We just don’t want them notified on posts in the topic more than once if they haven’t read the topic.
Details of the use case:
User A, B and C are all watching a Topic and are completely caught up on all posts in the Topic
User A creates a new Post
Discourse delivers an email notice to User B and User C
User B clicks and views the topic
User A adds another post to the topic
What I would like to happen:
→ Only User B gets an email notice of the new post
The reason that User B wouldn’t get a notice is that they have already received notification that there has been an update on the topic - sending another notice clutters their inbox.
Maybe ‘tracking’ does something here? It seems like tracking has nothing to do with email notifications, though…
I suspect there may be some “why do you even want this?” type questions, so here’s an attempt to address those:
This is an internal forum that people use as part of their work - it’s a replacement for all the email back-and-forths - we still want it to be async (so Slack and other IM platforms aren’t what we are going for). Volume is low (5 to 10 new topics each with 10-20 posts a day in a given category), but every topic does need to be seen by every user, and we don’t really want everyone’s inbox to have 10 emails about the same topic when they sit down at their desk again. Further, we really want the user to work inside Discourse itself (we don’t want to clutter the user’s inbox with tons of posts that they have to try to keep track of). My original plan was to not even include the post content in the email (i.e. force users to click to see the discussion in Discourse itself).
If I can get my users to use a threaded view in their email client, this may be a moot issue - but if there’s a way that Discourse can be configured to handle it, I’d appreciate hearing it.