Kunena 6.2.5 & module Kunena Latest 6.0.7 released

The Kunena team has announce the arrival of Kunena 6.2.5 [K 6.2.5] which is now available for download as a native Joomla extension for J! 4.3.x/4.4.x/5.0.x. This version addresses most of the issues that were discovered in K 6.1 / K 6.2 and issues discovered during the last development stages of K 6.2

This category is for general discussion about the Kunena Project or this website.

Please use other categories for questions about problems that you may be having with your website.

Merged "Automatically" subscribe all members to be notified of any new messages

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11 years 5 months ago #121 by sozzled
*** Topics merged ***

These things are possible - anything is possible - but I'm not aware of a GUI-driven or "packaged" solution that meets these kinds of requirements. I realise this topic has been running for a long time and people have not liked the answers we've given in the past - and I would dearly love to change that situation - but I'm totally powerless to provide a solution that meets everyone's individual needs.

There are two easy ways that you can subscribe people to be notified of new messages:

(1) by changing the database; or
(2) by encouraging your users to subscribe themselves to categories or topics.

For example, we encourage every member of the Kunena community to subscribe to the category Official Announcements and News about Kunena but I am certain that there are many of the 30,000 members of this site who would object to receiving email each time a message was posted in that category. And there are the problems when email gets lost, misdirected and people have put their faith in a "system" that's not as reliable as actually visiting a website to see what's happened recently.

So, while it's "possible" for us to administer how we would like users to prefer to behave, sometimes it's preferable to let users do (or not do) things for themselves and to understand and respect their choice if they don't behave how we would prefer them to behave.

I feel optimistic about finding a solution that meets most people's needs but I am unconvinced that we will ever find a solution that meets everyone's needs.
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11 years 5 months ago - 11 years 5 months ago #122 by SylvainV
Hi,

Thank you to sum-up the problem.


sozzled wrote: I realise this topic has been running for a long time and people have not liked the answers we've given in the past - and I would dearly love to change that situation - but I'm totally powerless to provide a solution that meets everyone's individual needs.


The following link point to a topic that gives a good reflexion on how to provide a flexible solution, but somewhat complex to setup for non confirmed user.

www.kunena.org/forum/Requests-for-help-o...20-mail-list-gateway

May be you should not focus on a gui packaged solution, but a good old sysadmin one, with some cron job or something. GUI could be build on the top later.

Also, if patch or hack are available to provide such behavior, they aren't easy to find.


sozzled wrote: There are two easy ways that you can subscribe people to be notified of new messages:

(1) by changing the database; or
(2) by encouraging your users to subscribe themselves to categories or topics.


The solution 2 has been proposed many times, and it's OK.
But the requirement, what people ask here, doesn't apply to the situation you describe.

Unfortunately, the user is lazy, especially when the community is not Internet centric. I mean that the website is a support for something that is not related to computer, but just a communication system.

People asking for massive notification system have tried to ask their users. But users said: too slow, too complicated, should I click on each topic? Can we receive a mail, as with the mailing list instead...

sozzled wrote: And there are the problems when email gets lost, misdirected and people have put their faith in a "system" that's not as reliable as actually visiting a website to see what's happened recently.
[...]


I don't think people are expecting a so reliable system, email are not reliable, people should be aware of that.

sozzled wrote: I feel optimistic about finding a solution that meets most people's needs but I am unconvinced that we will ever find a solution that meets everyone's needs.


This "unconvinced" and "encouraging your users to subscribe themselves", is the answer provided for 3 years.

In fact admin asking for massive notification are hopping to have a google groups like system:

A forum with search and private topic + ACL, with archive, with mail notification, and may be mail reply also. May be Kunema is the wrong technology, may be it's a good start.


So just to go forward, what could be done, excluding solution 2?

Regards,
Sylvain.
Last edit: 11 years 5 months ago by SylvainV. Reason: wrong link
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11 years 5 months ago #123 by skyhawk85u
I have two situations where I would like an easy way in the GUI to subscribe small groups of people to various categories more easily than writing SQL statements. I can try to ask people to subscribe, but it's simply not going to happen and the forums will fail - they'll just go back to using email and miss out on all the benefits that the forums add. Having access in the back end to simply add category subscriptions to user accounts would be quite useful.

In my case I would also like every new person to be automatically subscribed to all the categories. And new categories created should be added to everyone's subscriptions. I don't see why that couldn't be an option that the admin could turn on if they want. If you don't want it, don't use it. Seems like that would meet everyone's needs for automatic subscription.
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11 years 5 months ago #124 by Steakman
I totally agree with skyhawk85u, and I used to use a Forum called DiscusPro (sadly no longer being developed and will not integrate into Joomla) which had this feature and allowed users to un-subscribe themselves if they wished.

Our website participation collapsed when we moved to Joomla and lost this feature :(
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11 years 5 months ago #125 by kiwi3685
I agree with oscarfishlover. I have been a member of forums where the default is to be subscribed to everything. It's a real pain in the posterior, and quickly drove me away. Even after I un-subscribed from all categories, I soon became a subscriber of any new categories that were created.
Treat your users with dignity and respect, and allow them to control their own lives easily, or you won't have many users for long. Or is your forum so bad you have to force users to be interested?
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11 years 5 months ago #126 by skyhawk85u
But shouldn't it be up to the administrators to run their own forums the way they want to? In my case forums are taking over from old email lists, so I need to duplicate that functionality but my technologically-challenged users can't figure out how to subscribe themselves to every category. Far easier for everyone if I could take care of that for them myself. It's a huge deal.
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11 years 5 months ago - 11 years 5 months ago #127 by sozzled

skyhawk85u wrote: But shouldn't it be up to the administrators to run their own forums the way they want to?

I totally agree with you. It is the right of every site administrator to run their forum the way they want to. Sure, you can run a site "by committee" but, at the end of the day, the nicest thing we could say about site administration is that it operates under the control of a benign dictatorship. Absolutely it should be up to administrators to do whatever they want to do under the terms of their dictatorship. But this is totally off-topic to the question how to "automatically" force all members of your community to receive an email notification of every message posted on your site (or on certain parts of your site).

kiwi3685 wrote: Treat your users with dignity and respect, and allow them to control their own lives easily, or you won't have many users for long.

I totally agree with you. There is no way on God's earth that I would ever run a forum any other way. I believe that people are intelligent enough to teach other people how to use a forum effectively and I also believe that people are intelligent enough to learn how to use a forum effectively. The difficulty is that some people are too lazy to be bothered to teach people and some people are too lazy to be bothered to learn.

This is not a huge deal. I do not believe it is healthy to treat the members of one's community as incapable of thinking for themselves or technologically-challenged beyond their capacity to acquire new skills. It may be "far easier if I could take care of all of that by myself" but it may not necessarily be the appropriate solution either.

This topic (like "absence of a WYSIWYG-style editing tool" complaint ) has been ongoing for a couple of years and there has been no solution forthcoming. It's easy to point the finger of accusation at the Kunena project team and say "why haven't you guys done something about this problem." By the same token, there are 30,000 other members of this community, each of them perfectly capable of making an effort to do something about these kinds of issues. Perhaps if people were more prepared to make an effort then these things would not remain as open festering sores and we would have a solution.

We understand the issue very well and we sympathise with people's desire to "automatically" subscribe all members to be notified, by email, of any new messages posted on their forums. I have two questions:

(1) What would you like us to do about the problem and how much is this problem worth to you to fix it?
(2) What are you going to do if you impose the solution on your users and your users complain to you about receiving too many emails? :dry:

Sometimes there are no easy solutions to these kinds of problems but I think we should be aiming for a win-win solution and not a case of you-win-some-you-lose-some.
Last edit: 11 years 5 months ago by sozzled.
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11 years 5 months ago #128 by skyhawk85u
1) I've taken the step of manually updating my SQL tables and documenting how I did it here. I would offer to help with the programming but I don't have enough PHP/MySQL expertise (although I really don't see adding that optional functionality as all that difficult.) I'm making no demands from free software of course. Request, yes. And if I can find something that better meets my needs I'll just change to that.

2) It's not really the developers problem about how I choose to utilize the tool, is it? But to answer the question - I'll let them unsubscribe. No harm, no foul. A few people have already asked me to unsubscribe them but the vast majority are happily subscribed as that is the way they are used to getting information. I'm trying to REPLACE an email list with forums, and until people get used to going up to the website to check for new messages, getting notified via email is what they want. I'm already getting complaints from a second site I just put up that they're not getting emails. And yes, many of these people ARE technically challenged enough to have trouble subscribing to all the categories.

I'm a little shocked that you would try to tell me how to run my forums or that I'm not treating my users with the respect they deserve. I think absent of any real information about my sites you have no way of having any idea what is happening.
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11 years 5 months ago - 11 years 5 months ago #129 by sozzled
These are good answers and I am pleased that you have found a mechanism that offers you a workaround. Of course, an ideal solution would be one that requires little or no administration overhead but, as is the case in any website, there's always an element of administration overhead that cannot be completely eliminated.

As I have written before (and probably repeated myself in writing several times in this topic), there are two easy ways that you can subscribe people to be notified of new messages:

(1) by changing the database; or
(2) by encouraging your users to subscribe themselves to categories or topics.

No one is suggesting here that there's any right or wrong way to go about tackling issues like these. At the end of the day these are questions that each site administrator will have to deal with in their own particular way. It's your forum after all and it would be quite wrong for anyone else to tell you to run things differently if this is not something you would feel comfortable doing.

I would like to make a few general points that are not specifically addressed to any single person who has contributed to this topic.

It would be nice to say "fix the problem once and for all" but, for every fix, there will be exceptions to the rule. Fixing problems requires effort. In the real world, when you have a problem you either choose to fix it yourself or you obtain an expert who has the years of training and experience behind them to help. If you have a medical problem you pay to see a doctor; a electrical problem around the home, you pay an electrician; to install new pipes you pay for a plumber; to build a new room you pay to get a builder. Of course you can go the DIY approach and you may be able to solve the problems yourself (and maybe the solution is as good as what you would get by paying for an expert) but, if you lack the ability, the time or the necessary drive to go about tackling such problems yourself, there are always alternatives - and there are costs associated with those alternatives: time, money and patience. :)
Last edit: 11 years 5 months ago by sozzled.
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11 years 5 months ago - 11 years 5 months ago #130 by SylvainV
Well,

I'm just thinking about the yet another user googling to this topic:

Sorry I posted the wrong link in my previous post above.

Here is the good one : TOPIC: Mail List Gateway
www.kunena.org/forum/Requests-for-help-o...20-mail-list-gateway

TOPIC: Autosubscription Plugin
www.kunena.org/forum/113-User-written-Pl...osubscription-plugin

more URL

extension : Post by Email (reply by mail)
extensions.joomla.org/extensions/news-pr.../microblogging/12215

and it's PRO version
3dwebdesign.org/post-by-email-pro



Regards,
Sylvain.
Last edit: 11 years 5 months ago by SylvainV. Reason: adding url
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