Sug: Email notifications / Latest posts link / thread status icons + more! about forem HOT 22 CLOSED

Email notifications are easy enough to implement, with the emails being sent out by the forum system using the mail configuration of the main application. How precisely we configure the configure to send out these emails I don't know yet, probably some option in an admin backend somewhere. Users should be able to opt-out of receiving these emails too.

"v2" of this feature would allow users to opt-out of the emails on a per-forum basis. Or you could incorporate that into v1, if you wish.

Latest posts link This would only be useful if you could show the latest posts on that forum since the person last looked at that page. I can see how it would be useful though.

Thread status icons This is generally how I know if activity has been happening on a forum, but I haven't been on any super-heavy forums yet. The styling of the system is something I have not considered yet, but it should be easy enough to do with the asset pipelining stuff in Rails 3.1, having gems to provide different themes.

Who's viewing forum I can see how this would be useful, yes. Doesn't have to be names, just "5 users currently viewing this forum".

Who's online This could be useful too, but I don't think it should be a high priority. It's not a function of a forum system that I used a lot. It was more of a "nice to have" thing.

Who visited today Similar to the previous one, but even less of a priority.

Thanks for your feedback, a couple of good places to start!

from forem.

Sounds good - get the nuts and bolts sorted first the bells n whistles can come later :)

from forem.

Oops - didn't meant to close (silly place to put a close button!)

from forem.

Email notifications would be awesome to have :)

from forem.

I absolutely agree. Would you be able to work on a patch to make this happen? While I have the time to do it now (flying) my laptop is sans battery power. I'm also attending a conference this weekend and as such won't be much good until Tuesday afternoon Australian time.

The way I think it should work is that anybody who creates a topic should be subscribed to that topic. Then anybody who posts to that topic should also be subscribed. They then can opt in or out by clicking a "Subscribe to this topic" link near the reply link.

This would require a new table tracking what users are subscribed to what topics. I would call this model something simple like Subscriber and it would contain two fields for each record: user_id and topic_id.

I think we should also take care to automatically delete subscriptions for a user if their user record is deleted, otherwise we will run into troubles.

This functionality would also require adding an "notifier email address" configuration option to forem, which people would then set in config/initializers/forem.rb. The mail configuration is dealt with in the application and is absolutely none of our business.

In addition to this functionality, (and if you want me to buy you beer) there will need to be a wiki page set up explaining how to configure forem to send these notification emails and possibly a quick demonstration of how you can override the existing templates, which is just done by basic view overriding.

I think that's all that's needed for now. What do you think?

On 04/11/2011, at 3:04, [email protected] wrote:

Email notifications would be awesome to have :)

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#12 (comment)

On 04/11/2011, at 3:04, [email protected] wrote:

Email notifications would be awesome to have :)

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Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub:
#12 (comment)

from forem.

It sounds good to me so far, I'm not sure if I will have the time. But i did finish the categories support feature :)

from forem.

No worries. If I get a spare moment over the weekend I may do the email notifications myself, since it's one of those features a couple of people want.

On Tuesday, 8 November 2011 at 11:05 PM, Gabriel wrote:

It sounds good to me so far, I'm not sure if I will have the time. But i did finish the categories support feature :)

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#12 (comment)

from forem.

Clearly I didn't get a spare moment :) Would someone else care to tackle this?

from forem.

I'm needing email notifications too - I can tackle this if no one else is. @radar, let me know if you want me to do it.

from forem.

I started on it @jgadbois (under direction from @radar) I got as far as this: https://github.com/AstonJ/forem/tree/adding-subscriptions I can submit a pull request and you take it from there if you like?

from forem.

sure as long as @radar is cool with that. Would you add the pull request to my fork?

from forem.

I'm not sure how to do that so have added it here: #97

from forem.

@jgadbois: I've merged the awesome changes that Aston's worked hard on into master now. Is there anything you can see to improve?

from forem.

When I looked the other day the subscriptions got set up, but emails weren't actually getting set out to subscribers. I'd like to hook all that up. I don't think any of the front end for subscribing was there yet either.

from forem.

Yup that's correct, Aston was going to work on that next. I think he may be doing that now in his branch. You're also right about there not be a front-end for it. Perhaps you two could work on this together?

from forem.

I did start on it: https://github.com/AstonJ/forem/tree/email-notifications but I'm sure I screwed something up as SQLite keeps giving me a BusyException now.

The email-notifications branch was just my rough attempt tbh, so I really don't mind if you scrap it and go ahead and redo it from scratch @jgadbois.

I don't mind helping out but just bear in mind I'm very new to this (and so I won't be offended if you'd rather do it yourself - I can always help out on sommin else if need be - I'm sure Ryan will be able to find something else for me to work on, lol).

from forem.

I'm happy to take a look, but if you want I can work on the front end subscription stuff if you want to keep working on the emails.

@radar - could you take a look at my other pull request and hopefully get it merged as I screwed up and committed some of that work into master on my fork.

from forem.

Which pull request? I don't see one. I see your issue #78, but nothing else.

from forem.

#79

from forem.

Hi guys I've got this far: https://github.com/AstonJ/forem/tree/email-notifications

In Ryan's book he uses an Observer:

class CommentObserver < ActiveRecord::Observer
def after_create(comment)
(comment.ticket.watchers - [comment.user]).each do |user|
Notifier.comment_updated(comment, user).deliver
end end

But I've used an after_create instead. I think my association is wrong - can you give me some pointers please?

from forem.

Closing this one now.

The reasoning is thus:

• Nobody else has requested the other features, and so they're currently "YAGNI".
• We'll deal with feature requests like Rails and Spree do, meaning that if a 'large' number of people request them then we'll do work on them. If they have code attached then we will seriously consider merging it in provided we get consensus from a majority.

Ok?

from forem.

Sounds good Ryan!

from forem.