Forem Creators and Builders 🌱

Discussion on: My Revue + Twitter Newsletter Experience

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ildi profile image
Ildi

This is more clear to me now. I guess you'll be taking the Forem onboarding emails and adding them to your Revue newsletter, so subscribers will only be recieving your Revue newsletter.

I had it all mixed up because I thought Forem newsletter feature was automated and done through Mailchimp but if im understanding you correctly, the "periodic email digests" via Forem are not available to us yet? It's a bit confusing because the info regarding email digests inside the Forem docs does not reflect this.

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lee profile image
Lee • Edited

Yeah I think that’s what I will be doing. I have requested to bump daily digest emails up the queue with the core team as I see it as been a core element of interaction. At the moment it’s configured per tag with a high rate of posted needed to trigger. What we need is a base level for new communities that sends out an automated daily digest of posts from the whole community.

Really looking forward to that one coming in

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ildi profile image
Ildi

I agree that all Forem communities can benefit from email digests, despite the size of the community. Seems useful for retaining users/reminding them to come back to the site.

I would like to understand what the current paramaters are that must be met in order to trigger email digests. I did notice that you opened a github issue about this in the past. It looks like there's a score system + user experience level at play based on this code which was linked in the Forem docs.

This is also mentioned:

Your Forem will need at least 3 posts before Email digests are triggered to send automatically.

On second thought, automatic emails for smaller communities might be tricky if not enough content is being created. It makes sense that until a community hits a certain size, the admin should manually compose emails and hand-pick the content that she/he thinks the community will want to know about. A weekly digest might work better for smaller Forem communities instead of daily.

Im not sure who is working on newsletter/email functionality but maybe @ellativity and @michaeltharrington can help to clarify some of this stuff. Im also curious if there are any updates coming that relate to what we've been discussing here.

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lee profile image
Lee

Yeah agree with that although I have been cautious about flooding members with a daily mailchimp email with a unsubscribe button (i think the daily digest directs you to unsubscribe from with your forem profile settings rather than mailchimp).

I think it comes down to good moderation initially, if your forem is small then it’s much easier to moderate the content which in turn will allow for a higher value daily digest.

Agree on the frequency, would be great if that was customisable, maybe ever 3 days to fill in the newsletter gap or whatever you choose.

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ellativity profile image
Ella (she/her/elle)

This is an area that I have a lot of feelings about! I really hope we get to it soon, because I believe it has the potential to impact a lot of communities' growth.

I thought Forem newsletter feature was automated and done through Mailchimp but if im understanding you correctly, the "periodic email digests" via Forem are not available to us yet?

The digest are available to all Forems which meet the minimum posting rate to trigger them. Right now that's fixed to 3 posts per day, possibly because fewer posts result in less varied content for the digest (I'm merely guessing it's to avoid repetition, so maybe @ben can better explain the reason for that number).

There are a lot of feature requests and issues in the repo for more Admin UI control over automated emails, digests, etc. We're really hoping @jennieocken and @amyatforem green light an overhaul soon, with the generalization of the newsletter API as part of that project, because in all honesty it still feels like legacy architecture from DEV.

@lee's feature requests in GitHub Discussions are helping move things in the right direction, along with requests from @noeltime and yours truly, so I encourage anyone who wants to join the conversation to weigh into these!

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lee profile image
Lee

Perfect, really looking forward to whats coming here, these are great innovative Forem features that I personally really like. In terms of the 3 posts per day, is that triggered per tag or will it fire at just 3 posts regardless?

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

The digest are available to all Forems which meet the minimum posting rate to trigger them. Right now that's fixed to 3 posts per day, possibly because fewer posts result in less varied content for the digest (I'm merely guessing it's to avoid repetition, so maybe @ben can better explain the reason for that number).

Yes, these are technically available, but fairly tightly configured to DEV's values. I think these would have to be adjustable for the automatic digests to go out similarly to DEV.