Reply by Email

[Cory Booth]

Many "bug" tracking applications use it...
Would it be possible to implement a "Reply by Email" so users could actually just hit reply to a froum email and have it added to the forum as a post? I know the arguments - it would drive down traffic - but.... I would truly pay top dime for a forum encorporating this feature... (goes back to Mobile/WAP support as well)....

 

[Paul B]

Without knowing what has happened to the thread since you received the email and replied to it, your post could be several pages out of date and meaningless.

I personally would never reply to a thread via email.

Email is email, a thread is a thread and never the twain should meet.

 

[Cory Booth]

Anyone who replies to a FaceBook status using your phone is using this type of logic/feature.

Hate to use the FB example, but... IMO it is why FB is taking over the world of online communities - they have figured out how to make this happen and make it easy.

 

[Cupara]

Let me put forth a practical application...
I just now came back from a boating trip down the ICW.
My plan was to keep everyone updated on where we were, what we were doing, etc...

Now I have a Blackberry storm, so yeah, I can hit my site via the browser, but it was painfully slow and cumbersome when underway...

Luckly I had already purchased WiForums, which is a stripped down secondary interface for Vbulletin.
This worked well...

But...

I found myself repling to facebook posts, rather than using my forums because it was just so much easier to hit reply and send.

So.... Maybe my site is too unique to consider such a feature, but I am sure there are other's whose sites are more about communicating than ensuring the user "visits" the site or whatever...

No disrespect intended, but these are the arguments I have had thrown at me before... "if a user can read and reply by email, they'll never visit the site driving down revenue....", etc....

Exactly what I was just thinking. Bad idea, very bad idea. Not only would it open new doors for spammers but hackers could find a means to use the emails to their advantage.

 

[whynot]

p.s. Not to mention it IS a feature no other package current has...
One more thing to make this software unique in feature not avail elsewhere.

"IP.Board supports receiving incoming Emails. Currently this is only used by IP.Nexus to support receiving support requests via Email."

This feature should be included in XF before it becomes standard in IPB.

 

[Shamil]

Again, I'd rather that this not become a feature. Members are less likely to revisit my forum/site.

 

[gordy]

Again, I'd rather that this not become a feature. Members are less likely to revisit my forum/site.

I 100% disagree, since using rss2email, i'm wishing my own forums have this, the usability to reply to a thread via email would be incredible.
Incorporating a mailman style email reply function to posts /threads would rock.

Since using rss2email (receiving notifications of new threads) my own activity on my forums have increased more than double, and that is read-only, imagine if i could reply while out and about - even better.

 

[Dean]

"IP.Board supports receiving incoming Emails. Currently this is only used by IP.Nexus to support receiving support requests via Email."

This feature should be included in XF before it becomes standard in IPB.

I can indeed see how replying via email could create a support ticket for a certain user group to see e.g technical staff or customer support.

I do not understand how it could work to reply to a thread. Out of the office auto responders to emailed notifications when subscribed to a thread would be one situation.

It could be done with enough care in the design, but I am not clear on what % of forums would use this feature.

 

[whynot]

I do not understand how it could work to reply to a thread.

How it could work? That would be the XF developers job to figure it out.
It did not work satisfactorily as a VB.org hack,XF developers might make it better for XF.

I am not clear on what % of forums would use this feature

Perhaps more than the VB and IPB blogs?

 

[whynot]

Again, I'd rather that this not become a feature. Members are less likely to revisit my forum/site.

One click on "Disable" and your fear would disappear.

 

[Shamil]

One click on "Disable" and your fear would disappear.

Still a bloat.

 

[jdj]

Without knowing what has happened to the thread since you received the email and replied to it, your post could be several pages out of date and meaningless.

I personally would never reply to a thread via email.

Email is email, a thread is a thread and never the twain should meet.

I think it's a great idea for the simple reason I run a forum using an alternative program and I've got people asking me for this feature. It's not necessarily a great idea if your business model depends upon page impressions but it's fine otherwise because that's what lots of people who still use Yahoo Groups get and they like it. The best sites are the ones with the best content and making it easy for people to contribute on some threads (not all) is a positive, particularly if they are using hand-helds in remote locations.

 

[jdj]

I think it's a great idea for the simple reason I run a forum using an alternative program and I've got people asking me for this feature. It's not necessarily a great idea if your business model depends upon page impressions but it's fine otherwise because that's what lots of people who still use Yahoo Groups get and they like it. The best sites are the ones with the best content and making it easy for people to contribute on some threads (not all) is a positive, particularly if they are using hand-helds in remote locations.

Further thoughts on this. I'm currently using an alternative forum software but I'd happily deploy both if I could get the facility to reply via email. Sometimes this gets negative feedback for all sorts of reasons..because there are concerns about the threads getting messy...reduced number of visits to the site decreasing page impressions and therefore advertising revenues. However, online advertising is a turn-off for some communities and a subscription model works if you have a good subscription manager. Nobody has the resources to develop everything but if:

- there was the facility to reply via email
- moderators of each group within the forum had the tools to keep their own threads tidy
- there was a subscription manager with the option for several payment systems

then I could envisage myself buying several licenses attached to several different TLDs. I don't know whether this is feasible but if there were a subscription manager within MySQL enabling you to connect different user IDs to different forums according to whether they'd paid or not then this would work for me. Might save Xenforo people having to develop such a thing themselves as perhaps MySQL's owner could do it.

Best of luck with it.

 

[jdj]

Exactly what I was just thinking. Bad idea, very bad idea. Not only would it open new doors for spammers but hackers could find a means to use the emails to their advantage.

If the moderators have the tools to moderate their own forums this isn't necessarily true. You get the odd rogue email turn up on Yahoo Groups that gets there via somebody elses computer. This doesn't stop Yahoo Groups being popular.

 

[jdj]

One click on "Disable" and your fear would disappear.

I tried the vBulletin.org mod and I couldn't get it to work consistently on 3.8.4 but then it was never developed for 3.8.4. However, the thing that did work was that it was just an option that you could turn on for some forums and not others. So you had choice. It remains a good idea if your business model is a subscription model rather than an advertising model. Even if the business model is an advertising model from time to time if users have to return to your forum to update their subscriptions then you can still generate advertising revenue in addition to subscription revenue. And if users have to return to see areas of the site where there are reasonable quality images you can still generate advertising revenue from those areas.

 

[feldon30]

Without knowing what has happened to the thread since you received the email and replied to it, your post could be several pages out of date and meaningless.

I personally would never reply to a thread via email.

You're not the market for this feature.

There are millions of users of Yahoo Groups (formerly OneList, formerly eGroups). These are discussion lists which have been going for 14 years now. And 80-90% of those users reply to and read posts by e-mail. It doesn't matter that people think it's antiquated. It doesn't matter that people think e-mail is a poor way to keep up with a conversation, this IS the way people have been communicating for 14 years. Not everyone wants to stop and check out a website to follow a discussion. And a lot of folks do not have iPhones, Blackberries, Androids, or other devices which make web browsing easy.

Do or don't, XenForo, vBulletin, IPB, etc. would benefit from supporting post-by-email. As for the technical aspects of how to do it and maintain the flow of thread discussions, well, if the knuckleheads at Yahoo can do it, Lord knows Kier and Mike can figure it out. Yahoo just do it by subject fields. A 16 digit hash/code would help immensely to keep discussions linked together.

 

[whynot]

There are millions of users of Yahoo Groups (formerly OneList, formerly eGroups). These are discussion lists which have been going for 14 years now. And 80-90% of those users reply to and read posts by e-mail.

Because it is convenient for them.

 

[Dean]

You're not the market for this feature.

There are millions of users of Yahoo Groups...

And everyone of the yahoo groups I have found is either

• non-public, need to 'join the group' & be approved to see the emails & post, and has a moderator, or
• public, do not need to join, and collects spam

I have yet to see a yahoo group that has moves at a rapid pace. A few emails a day at most is what my experience has been, and each email had the content of what they were replying to included.

 

[feldon30]

Based on your casual glancing at a few Yahoo Groups, you've decided that they are a market that forum software companies should not consider catering to? How enlightening.

The good Yahoo Groups are member only due to privacy and email spam reasons.

 

[EvilCrackGod]

You know I find this comparing forum software to Yahoo Groups and what not very unnecessary, if you have a forum for users then why not just let the users communicate by means they are most comfortable using? freedom is the key.

 

[feldon30]

I was more approaching it from, there are thousands of Yahoo/OneList/eGroups/etc. mailing lists out there with some members who want to go to a forum, but a majority want to stick with reading and replying by email. This is a market that, so far, all forum software has ignored.

I won't lie and say I know all of the technical requirements and development pitfalls of supporting and integrating these communities into a XenForo install. But it's worth a serious look. At the very least, a PHP POP3 or SMTP client would be required to capture and manipulate the emails.

Mailing lists are guilty of cyclical discussions where the same topics and same questions are rehashed over and over every few months. This may sound familiar to forum users, but it's much much worse, because there's no decent archive, and no way to point someone to a "definitive" discussion on a specific topic. You can't do sticky threads.

Ultimately it's up to Kier and Mike to decide what features XF has, but post-by-email is not a fad. These communities have been going for 12 years now.