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Forum auto-selection to send email
I get really tired of turning off the option to email all my players for every minor edit of a forum post.
Please add a toggle in site settings to disable this feature of the forums. Or maybe have it unchecked by default, so the poster can decide when a post is important enough to spam everyone's email.
I don't want my users to turn off email from OP, but if they get too much spam they will. So i have to deselect it constantly. Toggle off by default please.
Is there some way to do this with CSS?
Forum email setting
- Should forum email updates be opt-in by default?1 vote
- They should be off by default100.00%
- They should be on by default so the user has to manually turn them off with every edit.0.00%
Post edited by Hojou on
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@Hojou
That setting is already in the hands of the Players themselves.
If your Players don't want to be auto-checked to get email notifications about the Campaign Forum Posts, they can go to My Profile > Edit Your Profile, and then scroll down to "Prefer to receive notifications on ALL forum posts?" and uncheck and Save.
This only means that they won't be auto-checked. If there are Campaign Forum Posts that you, or other members of the Campaign, feel they should be explicitly notified on, then you can manually check the boxes on that Post.
If you feel like they maybe don't want to get all of the notifications, you could post one time in the Campaign Forums and let them know about the setting and how to uncheck it, and then after that, if they still have them checked, then you'll know they do want the notifications.
Obsidian Portal Developer
There's no way to do this with CSS, but you could probably use Custom JavaScript to do it. But, I'd still just ask the Players to set their preferences to what they want, and then let it be whatever they set it to be.
I for example get annoyed when I see a new Campaign Forum post and DID NOT get a notification about it. I want ALL the notifications I can get. : )
Obsidian Portal Developer
I think I might have left out the my main point when editing my post.
Of course they can just toggle it off. The problem is that every minor edit of a forum post will send an email. I don't want to spam my members, even those who want to receive notifcations, with five notifications about the same post, simply because I decided to make some edits.
So either, i have to toggle them manually every time i make a minor edit to avoid spamming my members or my players will get tired of the spam and turn it off, and miss important posts. For my use case, I want my players to leave notifications on, but I only want to send and recieve notifications for important posts. That means for most posts, i have to toggle it off (which multiple clicks, instead of just one to turn it when needed).
If I hear you correctly, you seem to be saying it's not needed based on how you personally use the platform. But what the developers like personally, and how they use a platform, isn't always the best approach to making design decisions.
A setting to create a simple flag is easy to implement, much easier than expecting users to come up with custom javascript to get around the site's lack of options. The more options you can put into the user's hands (like a simple setting to have them togged off by default) allows users to customize their experience beyond how the limited use case of the developers. ;)
I wholeheartedly agree with the stance that there should be a single button to click to uncheck everyone when you are creating/updating a page or forum post. As someone who very frequently pushes updates on my test site, I'm sure Nuadaria is sick of getting the update emails because they haven't toggled them off and I frequently am moving through the test process so fast that I don't always remember to uncheck the box. I'll also say that the site's behavior being that the person who is putting in 900% of the work involved with creating and updating the site (typically, anyways) having to uncheck those boxes every single time that pages/posts are updated is a pita.
I will say that from a design standpoint more options means more customizability (as you pointed out) which is one of OP's strongest selling points, but can have diminishing returns due to either increased or perceived platform complexity depending on the implementation and the number of people that could benefit from this change. In this case, I feel like there is a fairly strong need presented here because this impacts pretty much everyone who uses the site at all.
I think that adding this as an option on each page, as a checkbox that just unchecks all the other checkboxes or as a radial that allows you to toggle from sending an update email (to the same list that it uses now) or to just skip the email this time, is a decent solution that satisfies the need of minimally increasing complexity while functioning more in the same vein as other similar platforms.
What I wouldn't want to see is a default option that has to be changed in the settings of the site, as finding said option wouldn't be intuitive and thus would likely generate more questions (depending on the default behavior of course) than it would answer.
Then again, I've made fairly grandiose suggestions before, so take my feedback with several large grains of salt.
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Personally, I think everyone should be de-selected by default, and the poster can then select if an email notification should be sent -- I assume the majority of the time, an email notification is not the default choice for every post. Email notifications should always be opt-in from all perspectives.
I've added this request to the Feature Requests list.
Any other members that are interested in this, post here to increase the priority on this feature.
@Hojou
Personally, I think everyone should be de-selected by default, and the poster can then select if an email notification should be sent
Have you asked your Players to uncheck their Preference in their Profiles?
Have them go to My Profile > Edit Your Profile, and then scroll down to "Prefer to receive notifications on ALL forum posts?" and uncheck and Save. It's a one-time change.
Then, it will behave exactly as you are saying you want. Everyone will be de-selected by default, and you will be able to select whichever ones you think need to be notified for each post you Create/Save.
@Abersade
I think that adding this as an option on each page, as a checkbox that just unchecks all the other checkboxes
I'm not sure if this is what you meant, but if you click "Email All", it will check all the Campaign members, and then if you click "Email All" again, it will uncheck all the Campaign members. So, it takes 2 clicks on the same checkbox, but it does uncheck all the checkboxes.
But I think what y'all are wanting is a way to temporarily disable Email Notifications. Like a toggle on the page that stays set until it's switched back.
Obsidian Portal Developer
@Abersade
I'm not sure if this will help with your scenario, but if you know you're going to want to do a bunch of updates where you're not going to want to send Email Notifications, you can temporarily put this code into your Custom JavaScript:
While that code is in place, when any member of the Campaign visits an Edit/New for WikiPage or AdventureLog or Character or Item or Edit Forum Post, that code will essentially do the "uncheck Email All", which will uncheck all of the Campaign members.
You would still be able to manually recheck whichever ones you want.
Then when you're done with making the updates you don't want notifications sent for you would delete that code from Custom JavaScript and Save.
Obsidian Portal Developer
Default opt-out leads to people getting annoyed and taking the simplest route: marking unwanted emails as spam, actually lowering engagement. They are much less likely to visit the source and jumping through hoops to opt-out.
Rather than using your intuition based on your personal preferences, as a developer you should be following accepted industry standards and principles.
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Checking in with the team, we'll get back to you shortly! @Hojou
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@Hojou, we try to setup the defaults on each feature to be what most members will want, and what will lead to the outcomes that most members want.
For Campaign Forum posts, most are going to want to be alerted when something new is posted to the Campaign Forum, so the default is "on". Also, most are not Editing the Campaign Forum posts after they are posted. So, it sounds like you have an unusual usage in this case.
For Wiki Pages and Characters, most are not going to want to be alerted for each new post or for each Edit, so the default for those is "off".
Those defaults were in place before I got here more than 5 years ago, so I didn't personally choose them, but they do seem to be correct based on the usage we see.
Our email sender tells us how many of our emails are flagged as spam, and most weeks it's literally zero out of thousands of emails sent. Occasionally, like once a month out of thousands, an email will get flagged as spam, and when we reach out to the member to verify, they say it was a mistake and they want the spam flag removed so they can start getting the emails again. So, in practice, members are not flagging the emails as spam, indicating that they don't have an issue with them.
I mentioned my personal preference to give an alternative view that possibly your Players do want to receive the email notifications and when you uncheck them that in itself could be annoying to them. So, I was suggesting you could ask them if they wanted the Campaing Forum Notification Emails or not because most members do. And then you wouldn't have to worry about making the choice for them.
I do also personally prefer to get email notifications about all Wiki Page and Character changes, so I have those turned on for myself, but as above, those are not the defaults for everyone, even though that's my personal preference.
Obsidian Portal Developer
Thanks for taking the time to offer a thoughtful response. I hope my opinions haven't come off as too derogatory. Just sharing my thoughts. ;)