Forum 'Mail now' setting

Forum 'Mail now' setting

by Andrew Lyons -
Number of replies: 6
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Hi all,

I just wanted to get some thoughts on a minor change to the forum 'Mail now' setting - raised many years ago in MDL-19020.

At the moment this setting is used to bypass the post editing time setting - i.e. the setting which gives you 30 minutes (by default) before your post is sent.

There has been much confusion over this setting because this is all it does, and for those subscribers who are subscribed by daily digest, it won't make much difference at all. It will not mean that you get the message immediately (or whenever cron next runs at least) and the message will still arrive by daily digest as per the site configuration.

The consensus in that issue seems to be that the checkbox should send to all subscribed users as a single message and bypass the digest settings.

Another set of users also feel that this setting should send to all potential participants of the forum, not just those that are subscribed.

The proposal I have made is that we alter 'Mail now' to ignore daily digest, possibly adding a message to the bottom of the post to advise the user that the post was marked important and therefore their normal digest setting was ignored.

I do not think that we should make any recipient changes hang off the same setting, but instead add a new checkbox which performs this functionality - most likely in a separate issue.

It would be great if anyone out there can think of any uses I have not considered where:

  • the mail now checkbox should not ignore daily digest settings; or
  • the proposed send to all potential subscribers checkbox is undesirable (ignoring of course those cases where this is already the case).

Obviously the mail now change would be a change in behaviour and would only target a major version of Moodle.

Any feedback on these changes would be great.

Best wishes,

Andrew

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In reply to Andrew Lyons

Re: Forum 'Mail now' setting

by Richard Oelmann -
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+1 for both points

Mail Now should do just that for all users regardless of digest settings, and add a message to that effect to the end of the email. This probably does need a bit of text or Help added for the benefit of the sender too, so that they are aware that they are overriding recipients' digest settings

Should not alter who the recipients are, as you say, that is a different issue and one to be dealt with separately as a separate tick box.

In reply to Richard Oelmann

Re: Forum 'Mail now' setting

by Andrew Lyons -
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Thanks Richard,

That was my feeling too - the code is up for peer review now in that format.

Andrew

In reply to Andrew Lyons

Re: Forum 'Mail now' setting

by Derek Chirnside -

I'm with Richard.

  1. Mail now (overriding digest functions) - with message
  2. Mail to all potential subscribers - also with message "This has been sent to all members of XXX course"

Andrew, I have thought carefully if there are use cases where they are problems, I cannot think of any, except for option 2, maybe needing a confirmation screen "Are you really sure, this is going to 2,400,000 members of Moodle.org who are not subscribers of this forum"

-Derek

In reply to Derek Chirnside

Re: Forum 'Mail now' setting

by Robert Brenstein -
This button should probably be renamed to "Mail ASAP" since its "now" is relative to how soon the cron runs to actually send that email, which varies widely between installations.
In reply to Robert Brenstein

Re: Forum 'Mail now' setting

by Andrew Lyons -
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Thanks Robert,

I've contacted Helen Foster for her thoughts on the naming.

We do recommend that cron is run very regularly (preferably minutely to five-minutely), but there can still be delays if there are a lot of posts to consider.

This may be better resolved by adding a note at the bottom of the from explaining that you have x minutes to edit this post after sending it.

In reply to Derek Chirnside

Re: Forum 'Mail now' setting

by Andrew Lyons -
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Thanks Derek,

That's an important consideration I hadn't considered. I've created a new issue for the post to all potential susbcribers (MDL-53553) and have added it as a note in there.

Andrew