XF 1.5 Edit Email Notification Templates to prevent reply

[PJK]

I've noticed a lot of members will reply to email notifications, specifically for new PM's. At the bottom of the email is:

Please do not reply to this email. You must visit The Forum to reply.

This message was sent to you from The Forum because your preferences are set to receive email when a new conversation message is received.

To stop receiving email, please edit your contact preferences.

Perhaps that can be moved to the top of the email so it is more obvious. I'm guessing many people have this issue too. How can I edit the email template to re-arrange this and move it to the top?
Thanks.

 

[Mike]

In 1.5, the email templates aren't directly editable. Short of an add-on, you would need to edit any of the phrases that apply earlier in the email.

 

[PJK]

In 1.5, the email templates aren't directly editable. Short of an add-on, you would need to edit any of the phrases that apply earlier in the email.

What do you recommend I do in this case? I sent a bulk message out to 30k members and received hundreds of reply via email to the notification. Thanks.

 

[Mike]

You can also disable showing the content via the "Include full message text in conversation notification emails" option.

Otherwise, you might take a phrase like conversation_insert_email_html and add something like this to it:

<br /><br />Please do not reply to this email.

The particular phrase in use here will vary depending on the specific action, though the phrase names will be similar to that.

Beyond that, you could potentially do things with the address your forums sends emails from, such as having it autorespond mentioning that responses to the email will not be seen, etc. This would be outside of XenForo though.

 

[ActorMike]

@Mike @Brogan First let me say that XF is amazing and since we left our former software, our forum has at least tripled and our advertising revenue has exploded. With that said, these email notifications are a major issue for two reasons.

1- We need the people on the website, and the email gives away all the information they need. Only part of the reply should be included (or better yet none of it) and then perhaps a read more link. They need to click to go to the website for revenue, traffic, etc. Giving away too much information via email.

2- We did as you instructed above in red letters as you can see below and people still reply to the emails. see below from this morning.

I've been designing websites for over 20 years and have done UX for major apps. It's common for computer geeks to blow off issues like this thinking the user is dumb, etc, however it's clearly a widespread, repeat problem that needs addressed/resolved and is obviously confusing for some end users. It does not matter why they are confused, they are confused. This is not an isolated issue, this is widespread. You also need to remember that the demographics are not the same on all forums, so some people likely experience this problem more than others.

Please fix this in a future. I'm tired of emailing people back and telling them to post to the forum and auto responders are an annoyance.


Also if anyone can think of something that will work in the interim please let me know!

 

[Mike]

In your case, doesn't it make sense to not include any of the reply content in the email? That is an option that we provide. (I'd note that the emails are more directly customizable in XF2 as well.)

Given the example case, any sort of snippet approach wouldn't work -- that content would certainly always be there in whole -- so any amount of content could trigger the issue you're seeing with people responding.

As you've said, you made it as clear as you realistically can and people still reply to the email. There isn't really going to be a software solution to get them to stop replying (while still showing at least some content). The only solutions then turn to removing the content entirely, allowing some sort of post by email system (far from trivial and doesn't resolve your advertising concerns), or to use some sort of approach to make it clear to people that responding to the email doesn't work (an autoresponder probably being one that removes ongoing work).

I don't really see a clear fix that we could make, especially that would work for everyone. The closest option is removing the content but that is likely to be actively user hostile to a lot of people (and lead to people not necessarily coming back to the forum to see what the content is).

 

[ActorMike]

Thanks for sharing your thoughts! Sorry, I'm not familiar with the option on not including the reply content, could you elaborate?

Too bad there isn't a way to just do a snippet and then read more... I think that would be perfect, gets them on the hook, but doesn't give away everything. I agree, not giving any of the reply could be worse, hard to say, people are curious. I only run one forum so I really don't have enough information to know whether or not removing the reply content from the email is counter productive.

 

[Mike]

Sorry, I'm not familiar with the option on not including the reply content, could you elaborate?

The option is called "Include full message text in watched thread/forum notification emails." You can use the ACP search to be taken to it directly.

 

[ActorMike]

Anybody else have any thoughts on whether it's better to turn off the full message in text or leave it on?