Improving platform emails (notifications)

I have an update to share with you. We successfully deployed ‘under the hood’ improvements to our notifications service, resulting in even more stable notifications. 

At the moment we are working on moving platform emails away from the phrases tool to it’s own overview page with email previews. See a preview below. We don’t have an estimated release date for this yet.

If you are experiencing any unexpected/unwanted behaviour with the improvements listed in the opening post (or platform emails in general) please let us know by sending an email to support@insided.com.

@Yoeri What improvements are you making to the email editor, and are you also improving the private message interface? For example, when we configure ranks, we can trigger a PM to the member. But right now, I can’t use tokenized fields, add images, hyperlinked text, etc. 

The email editor will support HTML/CSS input, this is already supported in the current way of setting up emails - it’s just a bit cumbersome to do so. We will also make it easier to switch between edit and preview mode:

We are considering to add our WYSIWYG editor to the private messages, this will allow you to add images, hyperlinks, text-styling etc. We’re considering this for later this year.

Hi @Yoeri 

I’m being thick here clearly - I’m no longer able to find the ‘Phrases’ section, or any new dedicated area for updating the emails notifications. Can someone point me in the right direction? 

Thanks,
Tim​​​​​​​

@timcavey You find it under “Customization” (the pen icon) → Phrases. The configuration for the email templates is still located there. If you search for “mail” in the Phrases, you should get a list of all email templates.

Thanks @bjoern_schulze - I’m not seeing that option. I very much hope it’s not permissions related…

Hmm I see that you don’t have admin rights - it could be that this right has been changed recently so that only Community Managers can access this page.

I will check what’s expected and get back to you.

Thanks @Julian 

I need to have (and thought I have already) full permissions and access. My primary role is ‘Community Manager’ but now I can see there’s also an ‘Administrator’ role. Is this necessary to give me full access? 

Hi Tim,

I checked and it seems that in an improvement to re-work permissions, the phrases menu is only visible to administrators.

In your case, I would recommend to change your primary role to Administrator. As you cannot promote your own account to this role for security reasons, I will do that change for you.

There might be a side-effect in the way your rank title will be displayed - I am not familiar with your rank structure and how you organized it. Should you want to adjust that, you can simply go to your own profile page and activate a “custom user title”.

Let me know if there are any issues or questions!

Quick one here, do these current email notification settings allow us the option to include the actual content of replies, allowing users (some of which have reported login issues) to be able to see the reply without having to open the web page?

Hi Tim,

You can preview a snippet of the actual content for the following emails:

• @mention
• New reply
• New topic
• Topic answered

Add the variable {content} to your email template. This is how we styled it for inSpired community. 

Hope this helps

Note that there is a max amount of words for the preview, to prevent extremely long posts breaking the design (and to make people curious). After that, the preview will be cut off.

Also, this variable will only add the content, I recommend to add some beautiful borders, a title and the post url to get an experience like shown above.

Done, thanks both!

Two lesson’s here:

1. ‘Phrases’ section is super easy to navigate and update email comms even with only basic HTML knowledge.
2. It’s good to go through all email comms and consider updating them every year: they quickly go out of date! 

@Julian is there a way to restrict the word amount of the preview even more?

Hi Suvi,

It’s not possible to restrict the word amount in the preview