Why are weekly summary emails sent out as the default setting?
Why, when users are never even asked?!
The assumption that just because a user signs up for a forum means they want to be kept updated weekly seems very unfounded to me.
AI-generated summary
The discussion revolves around the default setting of weekly summary emails in Discourse. gubikmic questions why these emails are sent by default, without user consent, and suggests that the default setting should be off. codinghorror explains that the emails are only sent if a user is inactive for a week and are capped at52 weeks, with an easy unsubscribe option. However, gubikmic and refcherry argue that this assumption is unfounded and that users may not want to receive these emails. refcherry shares their personal experience of receiving unwanted emails from multiple Discourse forums and suggests prompting users for their email preferences during signup. codinghorror defends the current setting, but sam assures that the Discourse team is discussing potential changes to the defaults, including making it clearer what users can expect when creating accounts.
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I believe you are referring to the digest emails. You can choose your default frequency under Settings > User Preferences > Default Email Digest Frequency:
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Note that this weekly summary email is only sent if the user never touches the website for an entire week, and it’s capped at 52 weeks total – if the user never returns to the website again.
On top of that, unsubscribing is as easy as literally one click, included at the footer of each of the digests.
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I still think that the assumption is unfounded that every user who signs up to some message board is continuously interested in the activity there.
In fact I think that a lot of users sign up because they have some question and then maybe come back but many probably won’t (until they have another question). Certainly not weekly.
I think the default setting should be off; no weekly emails.
It’s odd to me that an open source tool used by many open source projects behaves like some startup trying to improve its “metrics”.
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Every discussion community needs regulars to survive, so one mail per week reminding fully absent users of the most interesting discussions – capped at 52 weeks – doesn’t seem unreasonable to me. If it is unreasonable to you, perhaps you should found your own open source discussion project and build it to your liking?
Feel free to change that setting on your instance.
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Well, skipping ads is “as easy as one click,” but we still have adblockers today because they become a persistent annoyance. People don’t like persistent minor annoyances. Sure, one forum takes a couple clicks (NOT ONE) to unsubscribe from, but most people don’t encounter “one forum” that runs Discourse. I’ve signed up for enough of these that I recognize the format of a site and avoid signing up unless I really need to, just because I know most admins don’t care enough to (or explicitly don’t want to) change the default email settings.
If they need it so badly, surely they’ll notice low activity and turn on the setting? It’s just a setting, after all.
If you don’t like how Windows works, would you really tell someone to go make their own OS? No, they’re still gonna encounter Windows almost any time they use someone else’s computer or write software meant for normal people to use. Any Linux user will tell you this. Sorry, this last statement of yours just reeks of hurt feelings and trying to shut the conversation down. A user of your software points out a common annoyance, and you keep defending it as if most people only ever join a couple forums that run on Discourse.
I know this is a necro, but I’m hoping that proves my point that receiving pointless notifications for something you haven’t touched in a while and forgot about is annoying. I just received one of these from what turned out to be the 11th Discourse forum with these email settings that I signed up for last week (searched emails containing the phrase “Since your last visit,” manually checked for duplicates / false positives). You could write a more specific email filter that auto-deletes these, but why flood your users with pointless emails in the first place? Some people notice these kinds of things.
You could even just prompt the user asking for their email preferences as part of the signup process. Everyone wins?
Edit: and I’m realizing such a prompt is still “one click” like you said, but that just further emphasizes how annoying it is to receive emails without consent a week after signup. Removing the delay before the setting is changed and just asking the user is nowhere near as annoying.
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Add Krita Artists to the list today. And probably this forum too, though I wouldn’t know because I manually turned it off after posting that. 12 or 13 so far.
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I don’t want you to feel like you are yelling into the void, we are discussing the “Discourse defaults” internally and considering changes here.
Particularly making it crystal clear when people create accounts what they are in for.
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