Newsletter Function

JamesBrown

Well-known member
This is looking good :) I have a few forums all working well on vb3.8 I tried vb4 and just did not like it. I will be watching this closely.

On one forum I have 13000 members and to get a newsletter out to them and stay on top of the list additions and deletions is a pain with so many workarounds. Any chance we could get newsletter opt in/out right there in xF. Or even better get one of the email solution companies like Aweber or similar to work with it. Thanks.
 
Upvote 34
Only speaking from my experience with a discord forum that I frequent - it has a built in newsletter summary and it does wonders for getting me to visit the site more regularly and reengage me.

It's not a site that I often think to visit of my own accord, it's not on my favourites, bookmarked and I rarely type in the address to visit it. But I enjoy getting the newsletter, it reminds me of the site and I get exposed to some really good content from it.

Email addresses are pretty valuable, it's an intimate place to get content delivered. If you're not receiving many/any site mailings from a site regularly as you're not a regular visitor (or even if you are a regular), but you're still interested in the niche then it can be really nice to receive a high quality summary of new content from the site delivered straight to your inbox without having to search for it yourself.

I get roughly a fortnightly email from this discord forum and it's chocked full of automatically selected good content laid out in quite a visually appealing and readible way.

It contains:

Some metrics since my last visit:
* x new topics
* x unread notifications
* x likes received

Then is has a 'Popular Topics' section containing 5 full first posts from very popular topics including:
* The thread title
* The user and user title
* The full post content including images
* How many likes the post has received
* How many replies it's received
* A read more CTA


Then it has an individual 'Popular Posts' section, with 3 highly rated posts in a similar format as above (most liked I guess)
As these posts are nearly always image posts these have great impact within an email.

Then below that it has a 'New For You' section, listing 5 thread titles I might be interested in, along with the category. I'm not sure what it bases that info on, or how that's tailored. Maybe based on which categories I visit often.

It really is a great way to get exposing existing members to the best content from the last few weeks and getting them back online.


Seeing as so many stats are tracked in XF, I imagine it would be quite possible to programatically generate these kinds of emails for users every week, two weeks, monthly etc.
 


The problem with this addon is, that it depends on how emails are sent from the core. You can not make individual settings how many emails per minute are sent out, how many emails per batch are allowed to have the same domainname etc pp.

All those very important settings to avoid to get on blacklists of the email providers do not exist in the XF core.

This is why I recommend to offer a bridge to a free professional newsletter script like phplist. That script has that all already. It is free. You can install it within minutes on your own server.

download link:

https://www.phplist.org/download-phplist/

The only thing which is missing is to have an interactionwith the XF core so the subscribe/unsubscribe and bounced email handling is checked in both apps and are the same in both for the same user.
 
The problem with this addon is, that it depends on how emails are sent from the core. You can not make individual settings how many emails per minute are sent out, how many emails per batch are allowed to have the same domainname etc pp.

All those very important settings to avoid to get on blacklists of the email providers do not exist in the XF core.

This is why I recommend to offer a bridge to a free professional newsletter script like phplist. That script has that all already. It is free. You can install it within minutes on your own server.

download link:

https://www.phplist.org/download-phplist/

The only thing which is missing is to have an interactionwith the XF core so the subscribe/unsubscribe and bounced email handling is checked in both apps and are the same in both for the same user.
It's unlikely that a bridge is going to be offered from the XF team; you're better off purchasing a custom add-on for it.
 
It's unlikely that a bridge is going to be offered from the XF team; you're better off purchasing a custom add-on for it.

If we stop asking for features and always say, we should look for custom add-ons for it, we never changes things in life ;)

This is a suggestion thread for new features. We suggest this now for 8 years. Your comment is really not helpful to get awareness for feature suggestions.

Most users here even do not know what they give up with the current email system in the core and how bad this can infuence their forum-reputation and their domainname and getting blacklisted as a spammer without knowing it. JUst because some do not undertand the probelmatic does not mean that it is not necessary to chnage that.

As an example: In Europe it is mandatory by law, that you have to provide an unsubsribe link in every email at the buttom. Until today, Xenforo ignores this with its bulk email system. Is this o.k., just because you do not need it in the US? NO!

Nobody here knows how many of your emails send by the core are getting really in the inbox of their users. We need to change that as soon as possible.

The developers (@Chris D ) said in another thread (XF2.0 comments) specifically, that they only implement this feature, if there is "enough" demand for it (what is "enough"?).

So it is time to educate the users and raise the awarness of a BIG problem obviously only a few users realized until now. ;)
 
As an example: In Europe it is mandatory by law, that you have to provide an unsubsribe link in every email at the buttom. Until today, Xenforo ignores this with its bulk email system. Is this o.k., just because you do not need it in the US? NO!
XenForo includes one-click unsubscribe links in all emails in XF2+.

Nobody here knows how many of your emails send by the core are getting really in the inbox of their users. We need to change that as soon as possible.
Those sorts of statistics are generally up to your email service provider (SES, Sendgrid, etc) to provide. You could also implement DMARC to get deliverability reports. You can also use https://postmaster.google.com for statistics on deliverability to Gmail/GSuite addresses. None of those are really things XF can provide in the core, and a system to handle bounced emails has been around since XF 1.4.

The developers (@Chris D ) said in another thread (XF2.0 comments) specifically, that they only implement this feature, if there is "enough" demand for it (what is "enough"?).
Probably relative to all other suggestions, which are generally gauged by first post likes: https://xenforo.com/community/forums/xenforo-suggestions.18/?order=first_post_likes&direction=desc
 
The developers (@Chris D ) said in another thread (XF2.0 comments) specifically, that they only implement this feature, if there is "enough" demand for it (what is "enough"?).

I think it's probably a few more than this suggestion, e.g not even Push notifications is there yet:

FirefoxScreenshot102.webp

I would certainly prioritise that above a newsletter, maybe because I have a mailchimp list, and all my forum members are aware of that.
 
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