What are some simple ways to improve digest emails

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

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

[charleswalter]

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

[simon]

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

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

Hmm, that’s a different word I didn’t see suggested yet: “summaries”

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

[alehandrof (Alex Armstrong)]

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?

[erlend_sh (Erlend Sogge Heggen)]

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

"Daily updates" option for mailing list mode

Continuing the discussion from “More granular mailing list mode”: Mailing list mode and some related features have received several updates recently. Minor tweaks include: Renamed “Email digest” to “Activity Summary” We now allow admins to completely disable mailing list mode. But most importantly, when mailing list mode is enabled, there is now a new default option called “Daily updates”. [image] [image] Enabling “Daily updates” will disable the Activity Summary to avoid redundant ove…

[alehandrof (Alex Armstrong)]

Thank you! I’ll turn this feature on in a few Discoursi (I think that’s the plural, right? ) 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.

[neil (Neil Lalonde)]

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

[tomeoftom]

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.

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

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.