I would like to give new readers the opportunity to watch a topic without registering. I’m thinking an elegant way would be to have a theme component that would display a ‘get notified by email’ box above the timeline in the right hand bar. The user could simply enter their email and click ‘Watch’ to get notifications on new posts to the topic.
This seems like something that should probably exist already, but I’m not finding anything by searching. Does anyone know if there is already a theme component out there that does this?
No Theme Component could achieve that, it would require back end changes only possible in the core product or a Plugin.
By giving you their email, they are in any case not just a reader, so why not just make them a Trust Level 0 User and get them to use the existing logic to register and watch the Topic?
Because people don’t like creating new user accounts. The drop off in the number of people that are willing to give out there email vs those willing to do the small amount of work to register is huge.
If you can demonstrate the value of the community by keeping them informed on the specific topic they were interested in, I think you’d end up with way more people coming back to register as full users vs requiring registration up front.
It’s a lot of effort to go to re-invent the wheel, but if you wish to make the effort, go ahead, of course.
However, I’d just say I’m sure I am not alone in having a site or two where some people just join and never post, sometimes because some of the Categories are hidden to the non-registered, etc., how is this any different? I’m sure a proportion of them register for exactly the example scenario you describe, to keep informed.
I wonder if you could just include this information in the welcome banner that appears for anon?
Encourage people to register as a User just to keep informed on a Topic? That’s a very lightweight solution?
I’m sure a proportion of them register for example the scenario you describe.
Some definitely will. But not as many as if there was a lower-effort way for the user to accomplish the same thing. As up-front effort increases, conversions drop. And usually not just by a little.
I wonder if you could just include this information in the welcome banner that appears for anon?
It’s not really a problem of information. I think you can expect typical users to know they can register and subscribe/watch. It’s a problem of attention and effort. Users have very little of the first and don’t want to put out the second.
When they first land on your Discourse site, most users wont be looking to join another community. They will be looking for more information on some specific topic. They might have seen a link on Reddit or found a topic via searching Google. Even if it does turn out to be something they’d like to learn more about as the discussion goes on, that does not mean they’re ready to do the work of joining the forum.
So at this point there’s a gap between the effort the user is willing to expend and what your infrastructure requires. That equals a bounced user that probably won’t return. If you make it easy to stay in touch, then demonstrate value over time, they should be far more likely to become community members at some point in the future.
Perhaps I’m coming from the technology angle on this.
The reality is it though, it would be foolish to write this without making them some form of User (technically at least), because so much existing logic could be used if you did that.
e.g. the “Watching” logic that kicks off when an update happens on a Topic is going to check for all Users that are watching that topic. You’d be mad not to leverage that, not least because anything you write will have to be supported going forward and if you use the core logic, it’s maintained for you!
Perhaps this IS a presentational thing where you modify the front end (and back end where necessary) to take an email and register it as if they hadn’t been made an official user of the site.
In reality, and technically, in the back-end this is registered as a new User, but you use some way of setting them apart - I wonder if not activating them might do it? There are various changes you’d need to make to make that work but it might be doable.
If you are really interested in building this and have budget, I’d post in marketplace.
It’s potentially quite a complex plugin, but an interesting one! We’d definitely consider it
I don’t know how complex it is technically with Discourse but is has been ages in WordPress-world. And it works. Basically it is just another mailing list.
Perhaps I’m coming from the technology angle on this.
My thinking comes from looking at the user journey. One of the things you do is look for friction points that might cause users to drop off.
You’d be mad not to leverage that
Perhaps this IS a presentational thing where you modify the front end (and back end where necessary)
100% agree. In the simplest case all you would need is to create an ‘uncredentialled user’. Basically a normal user but with no username and password. Depending on Discourse internals, that could be easy or impossible.
but you use some way of setting them apart
Would you really need to treat them differently? Assuming not having a password didn’t cause an exception, they would simply not be able to log in.
One new thing you would need though is a way of ‘upgrading’ them to a fully (i.e. credentialled) user at some point in the future.
If you modify the core logic via a plugin, you will have to make sure this new set of ‘special’ users are treated appropriately wherever the User model is accessed for whatever reason.
Absolutely. Something else the plugin would have to take care of.
Anyway, this is all theory atm, if someone wants to fund this we can take a look at it: marketplace
My wife regularly has other people sign up for things using her email address (Her last name is more common than “pfaffman”). This includes schools and doctors. Sending mail to an address that has not been validated is irresponsible and should be illegal. Sending email to someone who isn’t willing to register for an account is a Really Bad Idea.
Maybe there could be a way for them to send an email to request the behavior (they probably don’t have their mailer configured to send from the wrong address) or otherwise validate the email address.
Sending mail to an address that has not been validated is irresponsible and should be illegal
It is potentially illegal here in Europe. I wouldn’t suggest not validating email addresses. I didn’t explicitly state it, but those only providing an email address should still have to confirm, via a link in a confirmation email, that they do in fact want the updates and that it is their email address. FWIW this is typically referred to as “double opt in”.
Sending email to someone who isn’t willing to register for an account is a Really Bad Idea .
Sending topic-constrained emails to someone that opted in with only their email address is just a mailing list. I just checked and TheHustle has over 1.5M members on their mailing list. I don’t think you can really call it a bad idea.
Isn’t the idea though that the act of leaving the address is proactively saying they are happy?
I’m not understanding the question. Do you mean that they should be happy enough to create a user account if they were happy enough to enter an email? If so, the answer is empirically ‘no’. The eCommerce folks have studied this to death and there is a pronounced difference.
Agree on issue of lack of address validation.
I’m not sure how this entered the discussion. Sorry for the confusion as I would never have suggested that.
Number of touchpoints is only one of the problems. Users really dislike creating and managing passwords. The more accounts they already have, the more reluctant they are to make a new one.
People are also reluctant to sign up for sites that have low or no reputation in their eyes. No one wants to join a club they know nothing about. If you give them a lower-commitment way of staying in touch with your community, you have the opportunity to build up trust.
It’s occurred to me that what I’m talking shares a lot in common with magic link/passwordless authentication. It looks like Discourse supports passwordless authentication as of 2.0.0beta3. To accomplish my goal, you would additionally need to have the option to allow a user to register using only their email (and probably a captcha to deter bots), auto-generating both a username and password. The form where you collect the email could additionally have a ‘watch this topic’ checkbox.
The user could afterwards authenticate via magic link sent to their email (after verifying the email of course). If the user wan’ts to stop lurking and post, they could then be presented with the option to set their own username and password.
