# What are some simple ways to improve digest emails

**URL:** <https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-are-some-simple-ways-to-improve-digest-emails/33224>\
**Category:** Feature\
**Tags:** activity-summary\
**Created:** [September 14, 2015, 2:53pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-are-some-simple-ways-to-improve-digest-emails/33224 "2015-09-14T14:53:06Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 23

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**Author:** ![simon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/simon/32/339122_2.png) [@simon](https://meta.discourse.org/u/simon)\
**Post date:** [February 15, 2016, 5:39am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-are-some-simple-ways-to-improve-digest-emails/33224/23 "2016-02-15T05:39:04Z")

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Sometimes the excerpts chosen for the digest don’t make a lot of sense. This can happen when a post starts with a couple of short paragraphs (usually a salutation and an introduction.) It can also happen when a post starts with "Hi 🙂 ". For these cases, increasing the character count in `UserNotificationHelper#first_paragraph_from` could make it more likely that the excerpt has some substance.

I noticed a lot of posts in the BoingBoing digest are just a title and a “[Read the post]” link. It may be that that’s the way they want it. If it isn’t, and those posts are just being picked up by `Post#best_post`, it could help to add a word\_count constraint to that method. Something like: `posts.where("word_count > 7").order('score desc').limit(1).first`

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