What are some simple ways to improve digest emails

Feature
21

Nah, this breaks down utterly when there are dozens of categories. Current system is best, as far as user preferences page…

22

Any chance of excluding topics from the digest that are from categories that have been suppressed from the homepage? @codinghorror

We currently suppress a category which is intended for 18+, but we have users who could be registered under 18. Not to mention other categories which are not of general interest

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23

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 :slight_smile: ". 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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24

FYI digest was officially renamed summary in 1.6, for those that care about such things.

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25

I was confused about the purpose and functionality of the digest as well. Now that it has been renamed “summary” is there an open FR to provide digest/updates functionality, like that of Google Groups or traditional email lists?

26

Yes, there’s a “Daily updates” option if you’ve got Mailing list mode enabled:

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27

Thank you! I’ll turn this feature on in a few Discoursi (I think that’s the plural, right? :stuck_out_tongue:) to see if it will work for my community. Is there a non-technical changelog anywhere? During April and May I was in deep in the weeds organising a conference in meatspace and I’m pretty sure I’ve missed cool things.

1 Like
28

Some improvements in the summary emails recently:

  • muted tags are respected when choosing topics
  • categories and topics you’re watching and tracking are given priority

Done a while ago but not mentioned here:

  • the digest suppress categories setting will do what Charles was asking for, to define categories that shouldn’t be included
  • categories you’ve muted won’t be included
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29

Please, please change the 1-week digest default on new installations - it’s so infuriating. I don’t ever want a digest email, and forcing someone to go into settings for every Discourse community and disable the digest as part of their regular sign-up-to-a-Discourse-process is such a waste of time. When you sign up to a community, you don’t necessarily know if you’ll want to stick around - the digests assume you’re interested in the long-term just because you signed up. Please respect people’s inboxes.

If you want to give site owners the power to annoy people, I don’t support that but I can see why you’d want it. But please change the default setting, at least, so lazy installers don’t proliferate digests on tiny communities everywhere.

30

Bear in mind the summary is only sent if the user has not been seen for a week, and for no more than 1 year. Also unsubscribing is one click.

3 Likes