I’m really interested in this as a way to improve user engagement in our forums. I am very concerned about the fact that the vast majority of our users are on Gmail (which filters our forum notifications into the rarely-reviewed bucket of “forum” messages,and Most of our users are in their 20s and so tend to use texting over email, - so I don’t think most of our users ever really get any notifications.
I’d love to have an interface / mechanism to send very occasional notifications (you don’t want to flood your users with notifications as we do with email) and have a cap on it also for cost reasons (since you’re paying Twilio/SMS gateway fees).
Anyone else out there doing this, or have a recognized need for this?
I have implemented this for one of my Discourse instances as a simple hacky proof-of-concept, just using Discourse webhooks, Zapier, and Twilio.
I’m starting now to think about ways to build on this and create a SMS Discourse plugin, some particular challenges include how to manage and prevent spam, and misuse, and notification rate limiting. But it’s interesting and doable.
I’d like to see it also for periodic summary notifications - to try to pull people back to the forum. I suspect most users are like me - using gmail for email, and not frequently checking their “forum” category that gmail sorts the email into.
I think an SMS system would be much better at pulling users back to the forum.
I have a simple Sinatra-based webhook responder here which I use to send SMS in response to posts in a specific ‘alerting’ Category. It’s nothing fancy but it’s been working for 2 years without problems. We use a different script running on the Heroku Scheduler to test the alerting function once weekly.
The twilio-notifications repo linked in the preceding post is much more like what I would write if I was doing it again now. It would be good to have a configurable Twilio plugin, with both Admin interface for setup and User interface for opt-in/out of SMS notifications. If there is interest in developing this then perhaps a couple of customers could pool resources.
현재 이 프로젝트에 대한 크라우드펀딩은 진행 중이지 않습니다. 이전 작업은 제가 포럼을 운영하고 있는 Digital Health Intelligence라는 한 회사가 비용을 부담했는데, 이 기능이 필요했기 때문입니다. 현재는 오픈소스로 자유롭게 제공되고 있지만, 깔끔하고 간단한 플러그인은 아닙니다. Discourse 외부에서 실행되는 Ruby 코드입니다. 플러그인 작성법을 알게 되기 전에 이미 모든 작업이 끝났습니다. (아직도 플러그인 작성법을 제대로 모릅니다)
다만 Pavilion의 @angus@Ellibereth@merefield@fzngagan이 저와 함께 플러그인에 필요한 사항을 검토하고, Discourse SMS 플러그인을 만들기 위해 크라우드펀딩으로 달성해야 할 목표 금액을 정해볼 수 있을지 궁금합니다.
제가 이 기능을 개발한다면, 여러 API를 지원할 수 있는 채팅 통합 플러그인 방식의 범용 알림(notifier) 플러그인을 구축할 것입니다. 이렇게 하면 SMS 통합 서비스를 자유롭게 사용할 수 있을 뿐만 아니라, RN 화이트라벨 앱에서 OneSignal을 대체하는 등 유사한 용도로도 활용할 수 있습니다.
