Every community needs to do content maintenance at some point. Not being able to disable certain notifications from being sent while doing maintenance work, is a recipe for getting frustrated users.
Example: A community has one category with topics revolving around Blackberry and Windows Phones, and another category with Sony and Nokia phones topics. As all of these device types have had a rapid decrease in global market share, there’s no need to have several categories for them anymore. So it is decided that they need to be merged into a “Other mobile devices” category. In the process several thousand topics need to be moved from one category to another. As it is not possible to disable notifications (only inSided can disable them), several thousand notification emails would be sent out to anyone who has subscribed to the “target” category and has enabled email notifications.
(Spoiler: This happened to us this week. Our power users weren’t happy.)
That’s why we propose some technical and customization improvements.
Option 1: While notifications for moving single topics from one category to another stay active, they will be disabled automatically as soon as more than one topic (e.g. a batch) is being moved at the same time. This way users won’t get spammed with tens / hundreds / thousands of emails while moderators are doing maintenance work (usually moving multiple questions at once that have already been replied to or even solved), but users still get a notification when a single topic gets moved (usually when it is being identified in the current activity stream).
Option 2: On the (future) notification configuration page, there is a toggle to enable / disable every notification type, e.g. you can globally disable notifications for new topics in subscribed categories, but all other notifications stay active.
A combination of both options can also make sense.
Our moderator had recently changed the forum for a topic (blog). But he didn't know there were immediate changes when changing the forum in the drop list. He was doing some maintenance. Because the blog was moved, all our internal and external developers who have a notification on got an email off a year-old blog!
Something so small now causes a lot of unnecessary questions from our customers.
You have my vote!
Hi all, thanks for all the input on this idea, and we revisited it recently.
Curious to hear your opinion@bjoern_schulze @Moller Toma @Drew C. . :)
Hi@xiaoyu-shen , thanks for the follow-up!
It is important for us as a company and mostly power users when recent content is being moved. Our strategy is “peer-to-peer service first” (Community health) so we actively hold back on responding to all questions ASAP in order to give registered users the chance to answer.
So the usual use case here is: A moderator finds a question that was posted in the wrong category, moves it to another category but refrains from responding right away so community users get a chance to solve it. As some community users have subscribed to categories the have the most knowledge in (and/or want to stay on top of the questions/discussions), it is important to let them know when we have moved single topics to this category. Only if/when the community won’t react to questions after a certain amount of time, our moderators will pick them up so we can keep our service level target.
I think I answered this one above. I believe - especially in high-volume communities - some topics can get lost for registered users when there is no indicator at all if/when a topic was moved. If they don’t find these topics, it means more work for the moderators and also power users will be irritated as to why they weren’t notified about a topic where they could have helped potentially.
So if inSided decides to get rid of notifications at all when topics are being moved (no matter if it is one at a time or a bulk operation), then I’d strongly propose some other kind of indicator:
Great, thanks for the detailed feedback@bjoern_schulze ! The use case you described is very clear.
Linking this feature request as it may be useful for this use case:
This solution would be a bit more manual since you’d need to add the tag/toggle to each individual topic. However, it seems there is a need to have the confidence that no emails will be sent in certain scenarios.
‘Partially delivered’ acknowledges the fact that power users might miss topics to help answer if they’re moved silently. For now the manual workaround is simply to post a reply in the topic to explain that it was moved, but I can understand this adds extra burden to moderators and is something that you and others would perhaps like to see automated.
In any case, I hope category restructuring is less painful for your end users from now on
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You can now pause all system emails from the System Emails overview page: