Personalize Activity Summary Email: only send content from nodes they are interested in.

[Alpha1]

An activity summary can send out content that its totally uninteresting to the recipient. Maybe the member is only interested in one or two sub-forums of your site but dislikes some of the other sub-forums. If they receive content they dislike then most probably they will delete the email, unsubscribe or worse mark it as spam. Unfortunately people often mark legit email as spam if they dislike what they have received. They may even get upset. It happens.

To avoid this I propose personalization:

Members can do various things to signal they are interested in content: like, watch, bookmark or post content in a node (forum) or watch the node itself. If a member has done so, then its a fair assumption that the member is interested in content from that node.

For members of whom we can define the nodes they are interested in, it would be very useful to send them content from these nodes.
Similarly we can also define which members the member follows and therefore we also know they are interested in content from these members.

Emailing this content would make the mailing 100% relevant and interesting to the recipient. The member is far less likely to click the mailing away or even mark the mailing as spam.

 

[BIG LLC]

I agree. This would be very best practice. Where GDPR might think this is "profiling" a user - I really don't know much about the GDPR - the system should give the option for "full forum" or "personalized" or "both".

Our forum has, for the last few years, split up into many sub-communities. So, where a user might once have posted video games talk in the VG board, and sport talk in the board for their football club, their football team board now often has an off-topic thread prefix or sub board with things like video game talk, politics etc. So threads from the main video games board are of less interest.

So in all my variation on the suggestion is:

a) An option to send "all" or "personalized" or "both".

• all = whole forum
• personalized = use interest signals such as posts, watches, and reactions.
• both = Put personalized links first then whole of forum links underneath.

b) Perhaps give users the option to subscribe to none, either, or both of these versions.

c) Decouple subscription to this email list from the main "receive news and updates" option.

We have had to set up several custom user fields to manage different subscriptions including newsletters, advertising, sports team forum updates, tipping (pickem) reminders etc. This means there is no single "unsubscribe" screen for users to easily manage their mailing list subscriptions. In turn this means more emails reported as spam when the user is frustrated with the unsubscribe process.

d) One-click subscribe/unsubscribe. i.e. single link at the end of the email to let the user unsubscribe without logging in on the forum. This is industry best practice.
We wrote a one-click unsubscribe addon for ourselves for version 1.5 but have never been able to work out how to recreate it in 2.x. Spam reports decreased with one-click unsubscribe.