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With variables, you can enrich the user experience by including e.g. the username or the name of a topic. They are also essential as each notification will include different urls to content etc. You can even preview snippets of content directly within the mail! In this guide, you will learn about the different variables which you can use in each of our notifications.

 

Important:

  • Make sure to test changes on your staging environment first before updating on production
  • Variables are not universal - each notification email supports only the variables listed
  • It is not mandatory to use variables - however we recommend to use them
  • You can also use variables in hyperlinks (e.g. {url} as the url within {title} to make the topic title clickable)

 

Below, you will find for each email notification mail that exists. Just click on the spoiler for each notification and you will see:

  • Email subject variables
  • Email body variables

 

Activate account

This notification is sent right after the registration form has been submitted. The user must verify the account in order to be able to e.g. leave a reply on the community.

This notification will only be used for registrations via inSided (and not via SSO like Facebook, Google or your company login)

 Email subject variable:

Variable Description
{community_name} The name of your community

 

Body variables:

Variable Description
{recipient_username} The username of the recipient
{activation_url} An auto-generated URL for the user to confirm their account
{manual_activation_url} The URL a user can use to manually activate their account as a backup, if the auto-generated URL cannot be used.
{activation_code} The auto-generated token to use for account activation.

 

Welcome to the community

Once the registration has been completed (either by activation via mail, SSO or manual activation), the user will receive this notification to confirm the activation.

Email subject variable:

Variable Description
{community_name} The name of your community

 

Body variables:

Variable Description
{recipient_username} The user name of the recipient

 

New topic

Triggered when new content is published in a category a user has subscribed to.

Email subject variable:

Variable Description
{category_title} The title of the category where the new topic was created

 

Body variables:

Variable Description
{recipient_username} The username of the recipient
{author_username} The username of the topic author
{topic_title} The title of the new topic
{category_title} The title of the category where the new topic was created
{category_url} The URL of the category where the new topic was created
{topic_url} The URL of the topic
{topic_content} Preview snippet of the topic
{community_name} The name of your community
{community_homepage_url} The homepage URL of your community
{unsubscribe_url} A one-click URL for the user to unsubscribe from  new topic emails.

 

New reply

Triggered when a new reply has been published in a topic that a user has subscribed to.

Email subject variable:

Variable Description
{topic_title} Title of the topic

 

Body variables:

Variable Description
{recipient_username} The username of the recipient
{author_username} The username of the author of the new reply
{reply_url} The URL of the reply
{topic_title} The title of the topic where the reply is posted
{reply_content} Preview snippet of the reply
{unsubscribe_url} A one-click URL for the user to unsubscribe from  new reply emails.

 

 

Is your problem solved?

This email will be sent if a question has received replies, but not been marked as solved for x-amount of days.

This notification needs to be enabled first under eAutomation rules] in order to work

Email subject variable:

Variable Description
{question_title} The title of the question

 

Body variables:

Variable Description
{recipient_username} The username of the recipient
{question_title} The title of the question
{question_url} The URL of the question
{unsubscribe_url} A one-click URL for the user to unsubscribe from new reply/is your problem solved emails.

  

 

Topic answered

When a question has a reply marked as the best answer, every user that has subscribed to this question will receive this notification.

Email subject variable:

Variable Description
{question_title} The title of the question

 

Body variables:

Variable Description
{recipient_username} The username of the recipient
{answer_url} The URL of the reply that was marked as the answer
{question_title} The title of the question
{answer_content} Preview snippet of the answer
{author_username} The username of the author whose reply got marked as the best answer
{unsubscribe_url} A one-click URL for the user to unsubscribe from answer marked notification emails.

 

 

@mention

If a user is being mentioned by another user, this notification will be triggered.

Email subject variable:

Variable Description
{topic_title} The title of the topic

 

Body variables:

Variable Description
{recipient_username} The username of the recipient
{author_username} The username of the author of the reply containing the @mention
{topic_title} The title of the topic
{post_url} The URL of the topic (or reply within the topic)
{post_content} Preview snippet of the topic or reply with the @mention
{unsubscribe_url} A one-click URL for the user to unsubscribe from @mention notification emails.

 

Private message

This email will be sent for each private message a user receives.

Email subject variable:

Variable Description
- -

 

Body variables:

Variable Description
{recipient_username} The username of the recipient
{sender_username} The username of the private message sender
{pm_url} The URL of the private message
{unsubscribe_url} A one-click URL for the user to unsubscribe from private message notification emails.

 

Reset password

Once a user tries to reset the password, this notification will be sent.

Email subject variable:

Variable Description
- -

 

Body variables:

Variable Description
{recipient_username} The username of the recipient
{password_reset_url} The URL for a user to reset their password

 

Flagged content

Once a user reports content to the community team, this notification will be generated.

In order to receive this notification, users have to be listed in Moderation Notifications] within your Control Environment.

 Email subject variable:

Variable Description
- -

 

Body variables:

Variable Description
{reporter_username} The username of the user who reported the post
{flagged_reason} What the reporter has entered into the free-text field as a reason for flagging the post
{flagged_post_control_url} Control Environment URL of the flagged post.
{flagged_post_community_url} Destination URL of the flagged post.
{report_topic_community_url} Destination URL of ‘report topic’ of the flagged post.

 

Join a group

Sent when a contact is invited to join a group

 Email subject variable:

Variable Description
{inviter_username} The username of the invitation sender
{group_name} The name of the group
{community_name} The name of the community

 

Body variables:

Variable Description
{contact_name} The first and last name of the contact
{inviter_username} The username of the invitation sender
{group_name} The name of the group
{community_name} The name of the community
{group_description} The description text of this group
{group_thumbnail} The URL of the thumbnail image of the group
{custom_message}

The custom message added by the user who sent the invite
{invite_url} An auto-generated URL for the user to join the group
{community_url} The homepage URL of your community

 

Welcome to the group

This notification is sent once a request to join a group has been approved by the community team.

 Email subject variable:

Variable Description
{group_name} The name of the group

 

Body variables:

Variable Description
{username} username
{group_name} The name of the group

 

Join the community

This notification is sent once a contact has been invited to join the community. Read more about inviting contacts here.

 

This notification is sent once a contact has been invited.

Inviting contacts is currently possible only by participating in a private beta

 Email subject variable:

 

Variable Description
{inviter_username} The username of the invitation sender
{community_name} The name of the community

 

 

Body variables:

Variable Description
{contact_name} The first and last name of the Contact
{community_name} The name of the community
{custom_message} The custom message added by the user who sent the invite
{invite_url} An auto-generated URL for the user to complete registration on the community
{community_url} The homepage URL of your community

 

Account approved

If a registration has been manually approved by the community team, the user will receive this confirmation.

This notification is only used when the registration is set to nmanual approval] within the tPlatform visibility] settings

 Email subject variable:

Variable Description
{community_name} The name of the community

 

Body variables:

Variable Description
{recipient_username} The name of the recipient

 

New 'Product Update' email

Triggered when a new product update article is published in the Product Updates module a user has subscribed to.

Email subject variable:

Variable Description
{topic_title} title of the new topic

 

Body variables:

Variable Description
{recipient_username} username of recipient
{author_username} username of author
{topic_title} title of the new topic
{topic_content}

Preview snippet of the topic

 

Thanks for this post, @Julian 

 

Does anyone know if new email options in Control have meant the option to edit the automated rank-change email has been moved? 

 

I can’t locate the location of this...

Hi Tim!

So these options can be found in the settings page for each individual rank. It’s located at the bottom of the settings page:

For ranks, this is a private message and not an email, hence it is not on this page. The rank up message also does not include any variables.

 

For Badges, you can actually also send an email notification. The location for these notifications are also in the individual Badge settings. I assume this is the case as each Badge could use a different template for the notification, there it would not make sense to only have one notification (or one for each Badge) sitting in this menu.

If you decide to create a Badge notification email, the variables supported will automatically be visible in the default message:

 

Hope that this will help!

Hi team - can you share information why some templates are required to use {recipient} and others are limited to {username}? 

 

Also, it would be helpful to have a test feature that would do more than the current preview and would replace the tokens with test data, or at least callout if tokens are valid or invalid.

@Julian also wanted to note that the token for {recipiant} is mis-spelled.

 

I was trying to troubleshoot why my emails were not tokenizing correctly and finally realized that {recipient} won’t work, but {recipiant} does work. 

 

Is it possible to standardize on tokens and make them universally available across all email template types? 

Hi Dan,

sorry for the delay in getting back to you here. :(

Hi team - can you share information why some templates are required to use {recipient} and others are limited to {username}? 

These notifications have been added to the platform bit-by-bit over time, unfortunately this has introduced some inconsistencies here. I don’t know of any specific reason for it besides this. Of course we are well-aware of this, it makes the creation / editing of notifications a bit more complex than it needs to be.

Is it possible to standardize on tokens and make them universally available across all email template types? 

Yes, this is also something that we want to do. Of course we need to be quite careful with this and automatically “fix” all existing notifications in use already. Maybe a good way to approach this would be to support both versions (old and standardized) to prevent anything from going wrong.

@Julian also wanted to note that the token for {recipiant} is mis-spelled.

 

I was trying to troubleshoot why my emails were not tokenizing correctly and finally realized that {recipient} won’t work, but {recipiant} does work. 

Oh yes, this is one of the main gripes we have with these variables internally! Again, improving this is still something where we need to make sure we do not break anything. However rest assured that this will be one of the top items on the list to be changed.

Also, it would be helpful to have a test feature that would do more than the current preview and would replace the tokens with test data, or at least callout if tokens are valid or invalid.

I like that idea a lot! Maybe we could even add an option to send a test email - it would probably also increase confidence in having your notifications customized correctly.

I’ll surely share your feedback once more with the product team. Of course I also want to invite you to share your idea about verifying / fill variables with test data as an official idea, as I don’t think we have received such an idea already.

Once we have locked in a concrete date to start working on this, I will let you know. We might want to reach out to you for testing purposes, if you are interested and have the time to help us with all the improvements.

Are there any over-arching variables available in the email templates? Specifically, a {current_year} variable, as we have an html footer as part of each template which contains a copyright (year) in it. Of course, this only need be done once a year but it’s easy to miss. 

There may well be other high-level variables that would be useful. Perhaps consider separating out a header/content/footer sections for easier updating across the board - thought this assumes the header and footer would be consistent across all notifications which might not be the case.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts here!

We do not have such variables, unfortunately, but I surely understand where you are coming from. I actually remember my superusers reporting such things to us each year in january, it is a classic thing that get's missed to be updated on many pages. Something like this would surely make your life easier, as you would not have to visit each template and change it one-by-one.

A challenge I see here is consistency: Not all communities use a copyright indication, or even a seperate header / footer. But offering something like this as an option would probably not hurt. I will share your feedback with the team so that this can be taken with once we are improving the email notification settings again!

Hi @Julian,

it's not clear, but can we use variables in the subject?

I have multiple users asking for the topic in the subject line for replies and new topics

i.e {topic_title}

Category is not enough since we only have few

Hi,

thanks for asking your question! I was a bit surprised as I was quite sure that we actually do support showing the topic title in the subject line, but could not find it in the list shown above.

I have double-checked now, and I am happy to inform you that this is possible for new reply notifications. Simply use this variable for the subject line:

{topic_title}

I will update the description in the opening post to make sure this is corrected.

This will not work for new topic notifications, unfortunately. My suspicion is that this has not been added to prevent very long / cut off email subject lines if the category title and topic title both are longer, but I am not sure.

Hope this helps!

Hi @Julian!

Re: Flagged content
Once a user reports content to the community team, this notification will be generated. 

Do you know if private Group flags are included in this? We notice that we’re missing flagged content within our private Groups but we see them in the Content Overview dashboard as flagged. Is this intentional?

I have a question regarding “Welcome to the group”: Are there any URL variables available? I’d like to put a direct link into the group. 

I could not find any reference to this, so I believe we do not offer this currently. I can see why you would want something like this, I will share it with the product team!

I think you can still link to the groups overview page as a workaround. As the notification includes the name of the group, users will find their way from there.

The group overview page is to be found by adding this to your community url: /groups

Hi @Julian!

Re: Flagged content
Once a user reports content to the community team, this notification will be generated. 

Do you know if private Group flags are included in this? We notice that we’re missing flagged content within our private Groups but we see them in the Content Overview dashboard as flagged. Is this intentional?


Hi @ZapierSteph,

sorry I must have overlooked your comment. :(

Yes, if I report a comment in a private group, it will be flagged and such a notification will be sent.

If you are not receiving a notification, then you probably have not added your email address in the Control environment (under dSettings] - ]Moderator notifications] or this url: /settings/email/index ). In this case you would not receive any notifications for flagged content (e.g. from community categories).

I hope this will help, please let me know if there are any remaining questions!

Hi @Julian - Thank you for the response! Here’s our settings that have not changed for over a year now:

 

 

When we flag in public areas, the emails and notifications come in fine. But when we flag in private areas (like Groups) none of our notifications come in or work properly. The public categories work as expected. Can you advise?

Just a random thought @ZapierSteph . But it might work.

What happens if you delete that email address, turn the setting off completely and then set it back up again? Does that help at all? Sometimes flipping the switch does the trick!

Thanks for the additional information!

As it is working for me, and as I am not able to think of a reason or a way to fix this quickly, I am afraid I will have to forward this to our support team so that it can be analyzed properly.

In each case it is expected behaviour to also receive flag reports from there, so you are observing an anomaly.

I will keep you posted, hopefully it is a quick fix!

Just a random thought @ZapierSteph . But it might work.

What happens if you delete that email address, turn the setting off completely and then set it back up again? Does that help at all? Sometimes flipping the switch does the trick!

 

We’d already tried this prior. No change in behavior.

 

Thanks for the additional information!

As it is working for me, and as I am not able to think of a reason or a way to fix this quickly, I am afraid I will have to forward this to our support team so that it can be analyzed properly.

In each case it is expected behaviour to also receive flag reports from there, so you are observing an anomaly.

I will keep you posted, hopefully it is a quick fix!

 

Sounds good. Thank you!

Hi - is there a way to add the avatar of the {author_username} in the mail to humanise a bit the notification?

Something like : {sender_avatar} (for MP) or {author_avatar} (for mentions or topic followers)


Thanks

Morning @victorlacombe . :sunglasses:

Unfortunately, I don’t think this is possible right now. I’ve had a look through the documentation and there doesn’t seem to be anything you can use for this at the moment. However… That doesn’t mean it’s completely impossible… :wink:

Do you have access to the Ideas section here by any chance? If you’re a verified customer, you should be able to post this as a new Idea that could become a reality in the future. I’m pretty confident that it can be made possible with a few magic tricks in the future!

Hi @Blastoise186  thanks for the answer! I’ll take a look at the Ideas section indeed thanks!

Hi there,

 

Is there a typo in this section? Seems there is a confusion between the community and a group there.

Or am I missing a thing? Can’t seem to understand the actual trigger of this notification.

Other question : at what moment is a user prompted to join the community? Is there a way to manually sent an invitation to join the community?

 

Thanks for your answers
 

 

Is there a typo in this section? Seems there is a confusion between the community and a group there.

Or am I missing a thing? Can’t seem to understand the actual trigger of this notification.

 

Yes, this looks like a copy&paste mistake from the section above. It should be “once a request to join the community has been approved.

Other question : at what moment is a user prompted to join the community? Is there a way to manually sent an invitation to join the community?

I believe the “request to join” function is only for closed communities that you can only access when you have an account.

Regarding sending an invitation: There is a new function “contact overview” in the Control Panel (under /contact/overview → maybe it is not activated for your community yet). On this page you can upload a csv file with contact information (name, email address) and send out an invitation to the email addresses.

Thanks for the details @bjoern_schulze 

Is there a typo in this section? Seems there is a confusion between the community and a group there.

 

Hi @victorlacombe, sorry for being late with a response here. It indeed was a error while copying text, I have corrected this now. Thanks for flagging it!

Hi @Julian - it’s probably a long shot but I was wondering if there’s a way to reference someone’s profile field. For example, our marketing team would prefer emails be addressed based on first name instead of username. Is this possible? Thanks!

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