Feature request: “notify all” option

6.82K viewsGeneral
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I would love the ability (for admins/moderators) to notify everyone of a certain question (via email and as a notification).

For example, in my case, there are certain questions I would like everyone to see and answer on a weekly basis – and it would be great if there was an easy way to notify my whole community (instead of writing an email and manually linking to the question every time).

Just like you go to [more actions] and have these options:

  • Edit
  • Flag
  • Set as featured
  • Delete
  • Delete permanently
  • *Notify all users

You would have the option to “notify all users” that would send the question to all users via email and as a simple Anspress notification (with a certain role maybe?). Another option would be to have something like a wildcard mention [@everyone] that would work for admins only.

This would greatly help with community building and engagement and saves a lot of time when compared to doing it manually.

Lemme know what you think! 🙂

I too would like some built-in ability to ‘notify all’ for new questions. In fact, I would like it to be automatic, the same way that the ‘Notify Admin’ is setup. It would be nice to have an additional email that the ‘Notify’ options could be setup for. The main reason for us is that our users (intranet) don’t frequent the site, but if they were emailed about questions that are being submitted I believe that many would login to the site to comment and respond.

At the moment I intend to use the ‘Notify Admin’ to forward to the users, but that limits the options I would enable and then removes notification of other options for me (the admin).

Just a thought.

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We have developed a work around to achieve a daily/weekly digest using RSS and mailchimp…

Here’s an example for anyone interested:

http://us13.campaign-archive1.com/?u=23d59588d17cb3f3def6f5608&id=c6be92d7a3&e=99959ba28e

ps this has proved essential for our site… the day of the week the digest goes out, is the only time that we drive traffic/usage of the site.

commented on answer

Hello,
Its nice. It will be nice if you can share your workaround with community members. Thanks

Sure…

So to register users we use gravity forms (example here):
http://www.helpontap.org/register/individual/

We use gravtiy add-ons so that on submitting the form – a/ a WP user is created b/ that individual (inclduing their preferences/interests) are mapped to our mailchimp list.

THen within mailchimp there is an option for an RSS driven campaign. This autmoatically picks up new RSS items from your chosen feed. It’s self explanatory (and there’s lots of documentation). We set it so that our email list has a segment who wants weekly digests and a segment who wants daily digests. Users can login to mailchimp to change their settings, or of course unsubscibe.

We have customised it a bit by using our anspress categories as a further segment – for a narrower RSS.

e.g. http://www.helpontap.org/feed/?post_type=question%3Bcategory%3DOxfordshire

Using this RSS allows us to create a digest just for this category “Oxfordshire”. We let people choose what category they’re interested in, on registering, and then they only get a digest on that topic.

FInally we’ve also done an RSS on answers (within the same digest) – in our case http://www.helpontap.org/feed/?post_type=answer

The script we use on mailchimp looks like this… I hope that’s helpful!

http://www.helpontap.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/mailchimp.png

Thanks. I will extend this and will write a detailed article on it.

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1. The request is not absurd from a user perspective, exactly as hendre above says: “It is really hard to get a new community going if you don’t have this since people don’t just randomly check the site every day. To get a critical mass of users you need email notifications to encourage them to go to the site.”.

2. If it not technically feasible or you have a good reason not to develop this feature (Mandrill and Sparkpost may disagree with you on email doesn’t scale), then please say so. There is no need to be rude.

commented on answer

Hello Andy,
We don’t mean to be rude. Indeed, this feature is not hard to implement but we mean to say it will not be usable in shared hosting. We can surely develop a premium plugin which notify all of users using SMTP or 3rd party API. Thanks for suggestion.

Thanks Rahul, that is fair enough.

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Will think about it.

commented on answer

Cool 🙂

I assumed that the email notification plugin would do this. It is really hard to get a new community going if you don’t have this since people don’t just randomly check the site every day. To get a critical mass of users you need email notifications to encourage them to go to the site.

This can be achieved using email digest plugin. Email plugin will be improved more before 3.0.0 release.

Where can I find the email digest plugin?

Please search in wp.org. There are lots of plugin to satisfy your needs.

I’m also looking for the same feature – for all new questions to be sent to all users, so everyone is notified and has the opportunity to answer, not just the admin. I’m not sure what an standard wp plugin for email digest would help, as they do not hook into the anspress ‘new question’ but simply notify users of new blog posts (I use email subscribers plugin for another site)

This request is absurd. Simply for one reason. EMAIL doesn’t SCALE.