Question Create new user or modify moderator permissions

First off:
Major kudos to the Kunena development team - this is a great piece of work!! :silly:

My Need:
I need ALL registered users to be emailed on ALL new posts.

Currently:
The only way I can see to have all registered users receive an email for all new posts is to setup all users as moderators and set "E-mail moderators = yes"

Problems:

1. I do not want all registered users to be able to edit all posts. They should only be able to edit their own post.
2. The moderator list that displays for each category gets very large. **I took this code out manually so that it just does not display the moderators at all in the category list.**

Solution I am looking for (or possible suggestion):
Is there a way to create a group that I could choose what permissions are allowed as far as editing, receiving emails, etc. that aren't quite moderator permissions?


This site I have developed is for a consortium group. All registered users are consortium members and every member wants to see every post via email in order to have the opportunity to answer or follow up.

Although it may be possible to achieve what you're requesting, I think you're inviting more trouble than the solution would give you and I would strongly counsel against implementing the idea. For as much as you may want all users to be notified when new messages are posted what do you do in the case of the few users, or even the one, who don't want this régime imposed upon them?

You definitely don't want to promote your users to moderator status, just so that they'll be able to take advantage of Kunena's new message notification features. To do so negates the purpose of having forum moderators.

What you could do, instead, is obtain a third-party product that provides a daily digest of new messages. There are several such products around if you search the JED .

Another alternative is to encourage your users to subscribe to topics that they're interested in. What you can also do, to facilitate that encouragement, is to make the following setting change in your Kunena configuration:

Components » Kunena Forum » Kunena Configuration » Frontend (User-Related): Post-subscription checked by default? = yes

I think you'll have more success if you approach this matter from a site management perspective than from a technical stance. I'm sorry, but the requirement you've asked for doesn't register a faint blip on my radar screen of wants or needs.

Yeah - I figured we might have a unique need. However, I stand by our original thought. This consortium group is not a large one and the forum is for consortium members only. That way we will only have up to 200 or so users registered. This is also a very focused forum that only has less than 20 categories and will not expand. So the result is only a few posts per week.

It it has been deemed as a responsibility of their consortium membership to assist other members, so the steering committee has requested that all members be notified of new posts/questions?

As far as any unwanted e-mailings - that would only come when people leave the consortium and then are also removed from registration.

Thanks for the info - I will look for a daily digest of messages tool to see if that will work.

I really do think that Kunena is a great tool and I expect that even if I have to work out the code, I will certainly be using it for a long time to come.

Can't wait for the final release of Joomla 1.5 Native!!

mmasloski wrote:

Yeah - I figured we might have a unique need. However, I stand by our original thought. This consortium group is not a large one and the forum is for consortium members only. That way we will only have up to 200 or so users registered. This is also a very focused forum that only has less than 20 categories and will not expand. So the result is only a few posts per week.

It it has been deemed as a responsibility of their consortium membership to assist other members, so the steering committee has requested that all members be notified of new posts/questions?

As you say, you do have a unique, one-of-kind need that's beyond the scope of general-purpose forum software like Kunena and it would be more appropriate to engage a contractor to build a solution for you.

Speaking only for myself (and, I apologise in advance for wandering a little off-topic) I cannot imagine why I would want to join a group where its organisers (steering committee) decided on my behalf what was "right" for me and would remove my ability to choose for myself. Whatever happened to the notion of free choice or opt-in? :dry: No-one can presume to deem responsibility on behalf of a group's membership; such responsibility is either delegated by the group or it's usurped by fanatical elements within.

I respect your loyalty to your views. I, also, stand by mine. If you want to encourage your members to support your website's aims I would suggest you treat them like adults and educate them rather than rigidly impose a benignly dictatorial solution that may later cause resentment. There's an old saying "you catch more flies with honey" as my better half tries to tell me ... without too much success I must add :blush:

Good luck in your search. Cheers, sozz

mmasloski wrote:

Is there a way to create a group that I could choose what permissions are allowed as far as editing, receiving emails, etc. that aren't quite moderator permissions?


This site I have developed is for a consortium group. All registered users are consortium members and every member wants to see every post via email in order to have the opportunity to answer or follow up.

You could try the Restricted Forum User For Kunena 2.0 . I did not test it yet. I am not sure, if this supports e-mail canalisation, too. But it restricts the user permissions.

sozzled wrote:

Speaking only for myself (and, I apologise in advance for wandering a little off-topic) I cannot imagine why I would want to join a group where its organisers (steering committee) decided on my behalf what was "right" for me and would remove my ability to choose for myself. Whatever happened to the notion of free choice or opt-in? No-one can presume to deem responsibility on behalf of a group's membership; such responsibility is either delegated by the group or it's usurped by fanatical elements within

I was able to get the steering committee to agree based on your comments.
Here is the quick fix for us.

On our site registration form we ask (radio button) if users would like to be emailed on forum posts. That way they can change the status in their profile whenever they want.

I think this will be a better option to make sure our users are happy and do not feel obligated.

Thanks for the tip.

I haven't found a digest system yet, but I think once I do, that will be the best (an friendliest) option.

Congratulations. That's one small win for creating a democratically-run website. Another way to gauge user reaction would have been to conduct a poll. In either case we're still left with the situation of how to deliver a technological fix to the problem, namely how can Kunena be tailored to issue e-mails to those who want to be automatically subscribed to all topics posted without them having to select each new topic as when the topics are created. That part of the situation is still unsolvable in the current version of Kunena.

There are other reasons for seeking a digest solution but, I suppose, the main one I had in my mind was this. Because we are all very busy people, we don't want to be flooded with e-mails announcing each and every update to discussion threads. Consider, for a moment, if someone starts a "Happy Birthday" thread for one of the members, and this receives 20 or 30 "congratulatory" response, this will result in 20 or 30 e-mails being sent to (let's say 50% of your membership who may be subscribers) 200-300 e-mails and, along with the goodness-knows-how-many other hundreds or thousands of e-mails that they receive ... do you see where I'm going with this? It means that e-mails that are possibly important are lost in the flood of e-mails that are less-important or (put more bluntly) unimportant.

There have been suggestions in UserVoice to add a digest feature to Kunena. In the meantime, here's another suggestion that will work around your requirement and that will close this discussion as a support problem here.

Use mass mail-out: There are several free Joomla components that will do that. I use Acajoom from Joobi . There is a free version as well as a PRO version (that costs money) - the PRO version is supposed to have a digest feature. Users can opt-in or out.

Using mass mail-out means that someone will have to examine the day's postings, collect details of the URLs of the topics that were updated each day (or at least those that are "important" enough to bring to the members' attention), summarise the information in a document and despatch it via the website's mail-out facility.

Why not make that suggestion? Have the steering committe recognise the need to appoint someone as the "communications officer" whose job it is to write and issue a daily (or weekly) synopsis of what's going on.

Problem solved. Little or no technological effort required. Users feel like they're being respected and everyone's happy.

Good luck in your venture. I'm pleased I was able to help.

Cheers

sozz