Email Notification Improvements for Khoros Communities

[Ellen_G]

Hello!

I had a few questions about the Daily Digest notification ('Digest subscription notification [digest_notification.text]') and General subscription notification emails.

1. It appears that our Digest Subscription Notification email will include the entire text of a post, no matter how long it is. Is it possible to show  the first 1-3 lines as well as a link to read the rest of the post in the Community?

2. Is it possible to include images or gifs in the Digest Subscription Notification, or in a General subscription notification [immediate_general.text]? If not, might this be added in the future?

I wasn't able to find the answers to these questions on the Khoros Community on this topic but feel fee to point me in the right direction.

Thanks in advance! 

[lolagoetz]

I personally would rather see the whole post. Most of the time I hate to click through. This is especially true in a lot of technical communities I’ve been a part of. Would be interesting to have that configurable, but I think you’d want to ask your users before going that route. Like that would really, really bug me.

[Ellen_G]

Good point @lolagoetz. I suppose the other issue we have with entire posts showing in these email notifications is that there's little formatting - so the longer posts appear as huge chunks of text, which are hard to read. 

[lolagoetz]

I agree there...the lack of formatting does make for difficulty reading. 100%

[Drew_C]

1. It appears that our Digest Subscription Notification email will include the entire text of a post, no matter how long it is. Is it possible to show  the first 1-3 lines as well as a link to read the rest of the post in the Community?

2. Is it possible to include images or gifs in the Digest Subscription Notification, or in a General subscription notification [immediate_general.text]? If not, might this be added in the future?

---

Hi @Ellen_G,

It sounds like Q1 has already been answered by others here. I also don't know of a way to summarize or truncate long messages.

Q2, however, is one that is ultimately controlled by user settings.
https://community.khoros.com/t5/user/myprofilepage/tab/user-subscriptions:email-settings

I don't think this can be configured as an admin for all community members and I'm unsure what the default setting is for new users. Support may be able to flip that switch for you though.

Hope this helps!

[Ellen_G]

Thanks @Drew_C! Do you think the 'Automatic' format will include images?

I see there's also an option to include the 'Email Subject Only' which might help with longer messages. I'll report back for anyone following/interested.

[Drew_C]

I honestly got ahead of myself in that comment... I was hungry and supper was ready 🙂 Sorry!

The key option to note on that page is: Remove HTML from posts
The tooltip text pretty much says it all... it strips images as well. If this is checked, images will be stripped.

[jamiemccardle]

Has anyone ever tried editing the format of the daily digest using the text editor in Studio?

[snaffle]

We've done some pretty extensive CSS customisation of the HTML templates, but we've always copied and pasted the code from Studio in to a code editor and then copied/pasted back when we were ready.

A bit tedious but at least that gave us some syntax highlighting and auto completion.

The language used in the email templates is Apache's Velocity engine and you can do some basic if/else queries on some elements of the user profile data, which can be useful.

What I'd really love to see is the ability query the API in the email templates rather than just a limited definite subset of available variables.

[Ellen_G]

Thanks @Drew_C, I didn't notice that option when I first had a look. Tired brain (OK and probably hungry brain too at the time/all the time). Appreciate your help! 

[AryannaK]

Hi All!

This thread has great information that others in the wider Atlas community might benefit from. Would anyone be opposed to my sharing it on the Communities Product Discussions board? I hope to do so early next week, so please let me know either here or via PM.

Thanks,
Aryanna

[Ellen_G]

@AryannaK Sounds like a good idea!

[Claudius]

There's actually a function from Apache Velocity (the template engine powering Khoros notification emails) that should allow for truncating. Documentation is here: https://velocity.apache.org/tools/devel/apidocs/org/apache/velocity/tools/generic/DisplayTool.html

According to that you should be able to truncate the body to 200 characters by replacing occurances of

${notification.formattedBodyPlainText}

with

$display.truncate(notification.formattedBodyPlainText, 200)

 Haven't tried it out, but worth a shot.

[Ellen_G]

Thanks @Claudius! I'll check this out with our developers to see if they've tried it/can try it!

[HelgaMarieAuran]

We do this as well, show only parts of the posts and a "Read more" link to the full post. We would though want to send the emails through our marketing automation tool preferably, to get more insights on the usage. Anyone that does that?

[mhock]

@HelgaMarieAuran 

We don't send it through the marketing platform but I do receive a weekly report (via email) from Analytics that provides email details.  I think this is relatively new functionality (last year?) but I could be wrong.