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Hi community,

 

We recently migrated our community from another provider to Insided and things are going well so far. I’m not the admin, but I’m a very active user of our community and I subscribe to many topics and conversations to learn and to help out. 

 

One pain point for me is the email notification flow with Insided. There’s quite a few things that are problematic that I’d like to explain and see if there are any recommendations for.

 

Take the email message below. 

  • The area highlighted in red is nice, but other community platforms I’ve used will actually email the contents of the new comment or new post in the body of the email. This saves me time and mouse clicks if the new comment was just something like “thank you” or “the issue has been resolved”. It’s not clear to me what the end user value is in requiring the recipient of the email to click the link and open a new browser tab just to read the message. Can this be changed in settings perhaps?
  • The area highlighted in blue concerns me. What is the deadline to open the topic so that I’ll continue to receive notifications? What if a new message comes in on this same topic before I was able to open the email below? Would I be automatically unsubscribed? And how does this work if I am on vacation or holiday and not opening community topics during that time? Will I be unsubscribed to all topics that had more than 1 new post while I was out? I’d like to suggest that instead of an automatic unsubscribe, perhaps offer a link in the email that allows the recipient a one click method to unsubscribe from that specific topic. 

 

 

And on the topic of emails, when multiple notifications are received for the same topic area, the way Gmail threads them results in a situation where multiple extra mouse clicks are required to even click to the community topic. See below. The link to open the topic appears below the fold. This issue would not be that bad if the first bullet point provided a different end user experience, as the recipient could read the body of the message before deciding if they wanted to click into it, but as the current email notifications work, this is tantalizing in a frustrating way and not an exciting way.

 

 

 

FYI @lila_meyer 

Hi Dan,

welcome to our community, we’re happy that you’ve found your way over here and that you share your experience with your new community with us!

I can relate to the points which you are making. Let me share my opinion / recommendation one-by-one.

Other community platforms I’ve used will actually email the contents of the new comment or new post in the body of the email. This saves me time and mouse clicks if the new comment was just something like “thank you” or “the issue has been resolved”. It’s not clear to me what the end user value is in requiring the recipient of the email to click the link and open a new browser tab just to read the message. Can this be changed in settings perhaps?

This is currently not supported. We see the benefit of having the content displayed in the notification email, at least as an option. With B2C communities I see a risk of underminding community activity - if a user reads the answer to his/her question already in the email, it is likely the user will not visit the community and mark it as answered / thank the user who contributed. However I also think that Community Managers should be having the right to choose for that, in the end you also don’t want to hinder your users from seeing valuable information in the notification.

We have an idea (from Lila!) on our community just about this, I think you might want to vote (and subscribe) on that. We will share an update in this idea soon!

What is the deadline to open the topic so that I’ll continue to receive notifications? What if a new message comes in on this same topic before I was able to open the email below? Would I be automatically unsubscribed? And how does this work if I am on vacation or holiday and not opening community topics during that time? Will I be unsubscribed to all topics that had more than 1 new post while I was out?

Good questions & feedback! When I was Community Manager on another platform, I often saw myself buried in notifications, especially after being out of office for a few days.

Our approach is a bit different here. We only send a notification once and, unless you visit the topic (or you are being mentioned), we will not send another one. If, e.g. another ten posts are being created before you visit the topic again, we see that sending ten emails would be a bit too much.

Once you have visited a topic again, the system will send a new email for the next comment, and wait for you to visit the topic again.

So you are not unsubscribed, it is just that new notifications will be muted to wait for your return. I hope this answers your question? What is your feeling about this?

As the content of these emails can be adjusted, an idea for an improvement could be to link to a dedicated topic about this, or to explain the behaviour in more detail?

The link to open the topic appears below the fold.

I also notice this issue in my own Gmail inbox. As far as I can see it, Gmail automatically moves similar content below the fold. I am not sure how this could be improved easily, as the content of notifications naturally repeats itself. Maybe there is a way around it, I am not very technical, but I will see what my colleagues think of this.

If there are other things you see that you are wondering about, feel free to share it with us!

Hi Julian,

 

Thanks for your well thought out response above. I’ll respond point by point.

  • I read the thread you linked and upvoted and added my comments. Thank you. :)
  • I’ll give the notification on new messages approach a try. It’s good to know that it’s not a permanent unsubscribe and that any activity on that thread will open things up again. One thing to consider (and maybe your product team is already on this) is that if you change the behavior of including some/all of the comments in the email notification, this feature might need to be revised so that future notifications are not inadvertently paused.
  • The solution to the Gmail fold issue could be including some of the topic title in the subject line as it will then not group those emails together, I believe. 

Hi @Julian and others, 

 

I’ve been given some technical feedback about the Insided email notifications. Wanted to pass this on, see what others think, and if need be I can raise this as a feature idea:

 

It would help to improve security of the emails that Insided send out if they configured SPF, DMARC and DKIM correctly. That would remove the "via" tag which providers like Google put in when an email doesn't fully pass authentication.

 

What do we think?

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