Digests & important matters concerning the community.

[JeniSkunk]

Another useful thing for the Digest, would be to have more than just the first sentence or so of a post.
The paucity of post content, makes it difficult to decide wether or not to go to the Forums to read the complete posts.

Jenifur Charne

[Adrian]

Fair comments….

The digest is totally automated….it just picks new stuff out of the forums. If there is news in the forums it picks it up and sends it out. Any content has to be there for the digests to pick up at 2am in the morning – and that means it has to be in a forum. There is limited (or no) scope to add any “editorial” content to the digest – and if we did , it would probably be a millstone round someone’s neck to keep providing digest content in a timely way.

Granted any news in the digest only appears once – so if you miss it – you don’t get a second chance. But the plus in this is that the digests are not repetitive – each day something completely different is delivered to your inbox.

The purpose of the digest is to give people a reason to click on a current forum thread and engage with the web site. When the digests stop running there is a noticeable drop in the number of people visiting the forums (that’s generally how I spot there is a problem!)

Which is why it doesn’t give you much of the thread posting – if it did people would “read” the forums from the digest and never log in and look at the real web site. That would defeat the main purpose of having the digest.

Also not everyone reads the digests – I don’t have an accurate statistic on this one – but I suspect a lot of digests go into spam folders. What I do know is that 33% of the members allow the image on the digest email to load – at least once a week. So the other 2/3 may be blissfully unaware what is going on be it important news or idle gossip!

[Anonymous]

Quote:

When the digests stop running there is a noticeable drop in the number of people visiting the forums (that’s generally how I spot there is a problem!)

Obviously from the above comment the digest serves a quantifiable purpose.
From my own perspective (obviously a wrong one) I just assumed if people were interested in the potential for information, contact or engagement that they would check the forum regularly…or at least as often as their circumstances allowed.
I check as a matter of routine because I care about the forum & it’s members & … obviously because I care about myself … I don’t want to miss out on the opportunity to benefit from what others post.

It seems to me if people miss information it is their own fault … a bit like blaming someone else because you had your eyes closed.

[JeniSkunk]

Amanda, as I DO know that Yahoo does mis-identify emails, sometimes classifying legit emails as spam, I always manually check the spam folder before disposing of its contents. At least once a week, I find legit emails having been delivered to the spam box of my Yahoo account instead of the actual Inbox.
So maybe a reminder of that issue, sent to any members using a Yahoo email account, might be of use in reducing the unread Digests matter.

Jenifur Charne

[bee]

I have ‘images not displayed’ as my default with my e-mail service (gmail) so I guess my opening of the digest mails is not being recorded in the data.

I seem to get the whole forum posts in digests – they are not truncated for me.

I understand its an automated system – its too bad the formatting (in some posts) like bold or color just displays as text in the digests and sometimes makes them difficult to read. For that reason I always place the formatting in my forum posts on a different line (Like this one)

[Adrian]

Quote:

I seem to get the whole forum posts in digests – they are not truncated for me.

I think this has wandered a long way from Kristyana’s idea for a news feed. But to close the tangential stuff….

I had puzzled why some of the mods I have done (such as sending the digests even if you have logged into the forums) don’t seem to work. Bambi’s post sent me looking – at the terrible code used in the digests…and I found why some people have been able to configure their digests and others cannot – and why some changes don’t get through to individual digests.

So I’ve fixed things up so the digests are doing what they are intended to do – providing a motivation for people to log into the forums.
[ul]Edit: I checked and of the 13 people who had configured their digests to send the entire text 6 of them hadn’t logged into the site for a long time. [/ul] (Sorry Bambi & others who find their personal configuration is no longer recognised by the system).

The aspects of the digests that can/should be configurable for each user (by clicking on digests at the top of the screen) – are the amount of text it sends (up to 500 chars), the frequency of digests (up to once every 30 days), if you want your own posts to appear in your digest, and if you want to have a digest even if there are no posts (so you know the system is working I guess).

Now… back to the original idea????
Or start a new thread for a new idea?????

[JeniSkunk]

On Topic:
If the compilation of the Digests is an automated task of the Forum software only showing Forum posts, then could be a regular once a week News and Upcoming Events mailout?

Off topic:

Quote:

I think this has wandered a long way from Kristyana’s idea for a news feed. But to close the tangential stuff….

My first post in this thread is what seems to have forked the discussion.

The post was about improving the content of the Digests, via the amount of post text shown in the Digests, but somehow the post forked the thread into bug fixing the Digests.

Jenifur Charne

[Adrian]

Quote:

On Topic:
If the compilation of the Digests is an automated task of the Forum software only showing Forum posts, then could be a regular once a week News and Upcoming Events mailout?

Thanks Jenifur for the brave rescue attempt!!

We do have a short-term T-alerts forum for news of upcoming events. I seem to be the only person using it now. And I have on occasions put things there that are more news than events. So maybe I should relocate it???

So the News and Upcoming events mailout could be the content of the Alerts forum ( except most of the time at present the forum is empty!).

But simple ideas in the forum often get complex in implementation.
Do people in SA want regular emails telling them about events in NSW? Do people in NSW want reminders to participate in a survey that is intended only for people in WA? Do our members in NZ want to know about changes to legislation in Australia (and visa versa).
Do you need one newsletter or a separate one for each state?

And then, if you want the news mailout to be appealing enough to attract readers doesn’t it actually need an editor to put it together?
And is any one volunteering for this full-time role?

[Anonymous]

I was mostly concerned with matters that are of importance to the community as a whole. In the case of things such as surveys, research, legislation, health matters . A lot of theses matters are are found else where but not everyone has the time to troll through every activity on the site. I know people metion thing on the forums but as much as I am on there I still miss things.

If not on the auto delivery system could it maybe have a link on the header like say the forums, home, chat buttons etc

[Adrian]

Quote:

If not on the auto delivery system could it maybe have a link on the header like say the forums, home, chat buttons etc

That’s getting more into “can do” territory. I could make some space on the home page and give a listing of the T-alerts folder. That might even encourage others to put notes in that forum when there is something of general interest to be highlighted….