PLANNING: Email notifications and subscriptions

[ebarry]

As we move our email-based communications off GoogleGroups and onto our website, our ability to subscribe to updates by topic and location becomes more important. Let's make a holistic design approach.

Breaking out sub-projects:

Periodic Email Digests

• Display "activity from past day" in a list at /subscriptions/digest #2027 - Display a page of "activity from past day" in a list at /subscriptions/digest -- this will help show what people would be getting by subscribing (List activities for subscriptions/digest #2058)
• email templates for topic digests (needs breaking out into a new issue -- potentially Crontab jobs for sending trending Topics to Users #2091 !)
• add whenever gem for easily writing and deploying cron jobs which will be used in case of email digest.
• Active Scheduling of emails (pending Rails 4.2) #1584 regularly scheduled email triggers with ActiveJob
• Weekly/ Monthly digest for publiclab.org #1119 - another planning issue for Weekly/ Monthly email digest system, part of which is bring dealt with in the next issue:
• Better organize the Digest page - Better organize the Digest page #2378
  • Suggest a possible design for the email template (building on the digest page)
• ability to change timeframe of /subscriptions/digest to weekly or monthly like Github Pulse has
• Add a method in Subscription mailer for sending digests

• we made a User.subscribed_content(period) which collected all the nodes answers, and comments made in the specified period (solved in Display "activity from past day" in a list at /subscriptions/digest #2027)
• write unit tests against User.subscribed_content(period)

• add link and explanation from https://publiclab.org/subscriptions/ to https://publiclab.org/subscriptions/digest
• Choose a queuing backend (http://edgeguides.rubyonrails.org/active_job_basics.html#backends)
• Using resources like this, figure out if we can write a test for the email/activejob method

Reply-by-email

• Reply to comment by email - Reply by email to comment feature #2668
• install mailman gem - Reply to comment by email feature #2669
• Designing Mailers and email templates for Email Digest
• parsing incoming emails for correct comment text (see GitHub design reference
• Generating Node from email ( it would include processing the attachment like PDF's in case of a newsletter )

Configurable subscriptions

Ability of users to configure when they get a digest email and what content it contains.

• Simple starting point: as email digests come online, let's strongly consider using a UserTag to "activate" them for people. So only people with a UserTag like digest:weekly or digest:daily will receive a digest.
  • later, advanced subscription settings -- TagSelections, the primary means of subscribing, could have a type attribute -- like type = immediate|weekly|daily -- to provide more granular control over what you get in your digest
• signup offers to auto-subscribe you to tags you were looking at #70 - signup offers to auto-subscribe you to tags you were looking at
• tag aliases and subscriptions interaction #880 - tag aliasas and subscription interaction
• configurable email notification preferences #213 - configurable email notification preferences, or "what does subscribing to everything really mean?"
• subscribing to authors: Author subscription system #2088

Design issues

• simplify/consolidate "subscribe vs follow" and related UIs: Design and UI discussion of subscription/follow features, nomenclature #2693

• Move display of tags to more prominent location on content pages #1960 - Move display of tags to more prominent location on content pages

Additional related issues

• Create admin tag page #179 - we've gotten almost everything done on this giant issue except taking powertags out of the main tag list. Not sure why tag spam isn't a problem anymore, but it doesn't seem to be.
• " " empty tag causes error when attempting to unfollow #2097 - ghost tag (just a bug)

[jywarren]

Hi, @Gauravano -- does this work on replying to an answer, or to a comment on an answer? I found that perhaps it didn't -- can you give that a try? Thanks!!!

[grvsachdeva]

Okay, I will let you know soon.

[oorjitchowdhary]

Hi everyone.. Sorry I haven't quite been able to manage and follow this thread..
I don't receive any email digests for my topics..
I just want to know whether the digest email is currently active or not??

[grvsachdeva]

No, Email digests are not active. But, may be we can start working on that project to tackle remaining issues. Thanks!

[oorjitchowdhary]

I think we have our email layout ready..
https://github.com/publiclab/plots2/blob/master/app/views/subscription_mailer/send_digest.html.erb

So do we need help regarding the backend code meaning the ruby code to send emails, organize the mail etc..??

[jywarren]

OK, so I'm tracking this in #3404 (comment) -- but somehow the toggle for "want to receive digests" keeps getting turned off, and i have no idea how!

Is it somehow disabled when it errors? When could we be setting this? Any help appreciated!

[jywarren]

I believe we've completed almost all of this except for some template issues on the digests page, which is now it's own issue and part of GCI 2019. Closing, thanks!