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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Hi!
I've added a new category to the forum. Does Kunena subscription can include a new category or topic specific users or group of users all over?

Regards!

*** Topics merged ***