Add-on Does anyone have a good newsletter addon?

[Alpha1]

I know there are a few nice addons that claim to offer a newsletter, but I am asking for something different. What I need is a mailing solution that has:

• Arrange & configure the layout of the email
• Allow us to define configurable blocks of digests from forums and addons. For example: the 5 most popular Showcase Entries and the 5 most recent Featured Threads and the 10 top rated media items.
  
• Unsubscribe & mailing frequency
• Use XenForo bounce functions.
• Use email styling
• Solid code top work on a big board.

Does anyone have an addon like this?
I would have no problem paying for such addon.

 

[Dadparvar]

I'm also interested in this idea too.

We were using a great system for our goal, but then decided to use a promising add-on. But unfortunately now we see we had a couple of wrong choices. (we lost a good amount of money purchasing products that never reached to a working state)

So we are also interested in a working add-on that at least has MUST HAVE features.

Couple of features needed for a newsletter add-on (in addition to what @Alfa1 mentioned and in addition to features that other newsletter add-ons here have):

• ability to create multiple digests (which will be sent automatically)
• supporting contents of big and popular add-ons from pro devs here
• gathering info and showing statistics of each email sent
• supporting Queue and ordered email (auto send email 1 to subscriber. and send email 2 x days after opening or sending of email 1. and ...)

 

[RobinHood]

One of the discourse forums I'm on has a really nice digest, really image rich too.

Not sure if it's core or not.

It shows:

How many new topics since last visit
How many unread notifications you have
How many new posts there are

Then is shows about 5 full 1st posts from popular topics, complete with images and how many likes it has and what forums they're in

Then it shows the most popular posts, but they could be any posts from within a thread. These are nearly always image posts on this forum, so again, it looks great in the email.

Then it's got a small 'new for you' section where it links to 5 threads it thinks you might like. Not sure how they figure that bit out.

All in all it's incredibly appealing and effictive at getting me to return.

 

[Brent W]

One of the discourse forums I'm on has a really nice digest, really image rich too.

Not sure if it's core or not.

It shows:

How many new topics since last visit
How many unread notifications you have
How many new posts there are

Then is shows about 5 full 1st posts from popular topics, complete with images and how many likes it has and what forums they're in

Then it shows the most popular posts, but they could be any posts from within a thread. These are nearly always image posts on this forum, so again, it looks great in the email.

Then it's got a small 'new for you' section where it links to 5 threads it thinks you might like. Not sure how they figure that bit out.

All in all it's incredibly appealing and effictive at getting me to return.

I got CloudFlares today which uses discourse. I like the new topics / unread and new posts since last visit section. Most of the rest seems tmi imo. I still haven't seen good success in using things such as Showcase items and such in newsletters but it may be specific to just our sites.

 

[RobinHood]

It works well on the forum I visit as there's lots of images in the threads naturally, so it results in nice eye candy to get me to click.

I'll sign up to the cf one to check it out.

It would be nice if there was a newsletter platform built into the core, where add on authors could format relevent snippets of their add on content type and the admin could inject it into the newsletter.

So the media gallery, resources, showcase, articles etc.

 

[Alpha1]

I get quite a lot of questions from fellow admins who need this.
Its quite bizarre that there is no xenforo equivalent of vbulletin's CommBull. It was one of vbulletin's most popular addons and IIRC it had its own subforum on vb.org

Yet, on XF there is nothing that comes close.

Since migrating to XF a year ago I have not sent out a single mail shoot to my members. I simply do not dare because there is no adequate functionality. I do not want to get blacklisted as I have built a good reputation for my mailings. And I also only want to send out emails relevant to the recipient. Otherwise people will just mark it spam.
But there is no solution on XenForo.

 

[Freelancer]

One of the “will it ever be available for XenForo” add-ons. Which are so many unfortunately. Much need this one.

 

[snoopy5]

I also would love to have something like this. Same as Alfa1, I asked for this already many times since 2013.

Snce nothing seems to happen, I am now in talks with a professional coder to make at least a first step into this direction as my own basic bridge between Xenfor 1.5.17 and phplist. See here:

https://xenforo.com/community/threa...-and-send-newsletters-out.84135/#post-1225335

I can not promise yet anything, because I do not yet know how expensive the bugfixes will be for me and whether I can afford it alone. Crowdfunding is not allowed anymore as you know.

My plan is that if it is not too expensive I will order these bugfixes and will then offer it on the ressource manager here.

If there is more interest then also in more feature like Alfa1 and others have written, then I would love to add more features to this based on that bridge with phplist.

As soon as I have more information I will update you on this. Hope that this will be over the next few das.

 

[Korny]

One of the discourse forums I'm on has a really nice digest, really image rich too.

Not sure if it's core or not.

It shows:

How many new topics since last visit
How many unread notifications you have
How many new posts there are

Then is shows about 5 full 1st posts from popular topics, complete with images and how many likes it has and what forums they're in

Then it shows the most popular posts, but they could be any posts from within a thread. These are nearly always image posts on this forum, so again, it looks great in the email.

Then it's got a small 'new for you' section where it links to 5 threads it thinks you might like. Not sure how they figure that bit out.

All in all it's incredibly appealing and effictive at getting me to return.

I know this is old, but I would love to see a screen shot of their email.

 

[RobinHood]

 

[snoopy5]

That is looking really cool!

What is ist and which forum software are they using?

 

[RobinHood]

What is ist?

?

which forum software are they using?

It's Discourse.

 

[snoopy5]

?

I meant the newsletter addon..

 

[RobinHood]

I think it's built into the core software.

 

[RobinHood]

Here's one from the official forum

 

[upnet]

Recently saw a discourse mailer from a relatively inactive forum. It is impressive. I used to never want to be the one sending out e-mails filling inboxes. But times have changed and it’s the norm. One a week is below average. I’m ready to start sending but the options aren’t great. Threadloom maybe, but costly.

 

[Cyberclaw]

I received Cloudflare's newsletter today (generated by Discourse), and it is a thing of beauty. Lots of eye candy and links that I want to click.

Is there still nothing for Xenforo that comes close?

 

[Reflect]

If there is no similar solution by the time I have migrated to XF in a few months, I'd seriously consider developing a clone of the Discourse newsletter system to bring it and a couple of other cool Discourse features (like thread summaries) to XF.

I would much rather someone else does it before I do (and I'd be happy to pay for the end result!). I'm a developer, but developers are hopeless optimists myself included. There's plenty of other things I should be spending my time on, mainly community specific functionality.

I'd like to stick with XF. Sure Discourse has some whizz bang features, but I don't think it will be a magical panacea to my problems, and could result in a lot of user pushback due to the major change. My users are used to my forum's style of very long threads slowly developing a concept with lots of cross referenced information. This is a mode of discussion which an infinite scroll SPA like Discourse was not designed to handle and XF handles very well. Borrowing a few neat tricks from Discourse/Flarum and bringing them to XF is a worthy idea though IMO.

 

[ichpen]

I've been using Dragonbytes mailer and digest add on. It's nowhere close to discourse levels but it's fine for basic digests. It does embed some forum images and is user configurable. Needs work still.

 

[DragonByte Tech]

I've been using Dragonbytes mailer and digest add on. It's nowhere close to discourse levels but it's fine for basic digests. It does embed some forum images and is user configurable. Needs work still.

Then again it's not aiming to be on the same level as dedicated mailing list software (that has taken years and millions of dollars in development costs to produce), nor can / should it directly copy another forum software's layout

That being said, the feature requests prefix in the support forum @DBTech is always available for new ideas