10 December 2008, 17:01

Gidday, I'm using the email digest option for forum notifications on Mahara.org. I just switched to this a few days ago and have noticed that instead of getting a collated version of all the forum posts, the digest email just contains repeated entries of 1 post. i.e. for every post that occurs within the forums, I get a copy of the first post repeated.

Excerpt below.

Cheers
D

This is an auto generated notification from mahara.org.  Following is the daily digest of all your notifications

--------------------------------------------------

Activity type: [[type11/activity]] at 10 December 2008,  6:00 AM

Hello and thanks for prompt response.

Our estimate is based on LAN usage which has run out mopre than once over recent years (even after increasgin disk capacity) as more muiltimedia work is undertaken, though I take your point on many users underutilisieng what is made available to them. I guess it is finding the optimum limit to place on the storage quota - maybe even lowe than the 350MB suggested, thus allowing more for the 'superusers' who seem to eat as much (and more)as they are given.

We will look into LVM - not something with which we are familiar, and maybe come back for any clarification if that is Ok.

That may also help with our understaning of backups.

Is the principle similar to Moodle - ie backup 3 things - script/website, database and file storage area?

I have seen staff and student guides to Mahara - are there any docs for system admins? (or are they in the download)

thanks
http://mahara.org/interaction/forum/topic.php?id=57

Activity type: [[type11/activity]] at 10 December 2008,  7:30 AM

Hello and thanks for prompt response.

Our estimate is based on LAN usage which has run out mopre than once over recent years (even after increasgin disk capacity) as more muiltimedia work is undertaken, though I take your point on many users underutilisieng what is made available to them. I guess it is finding the optimum limit to place on the storage quota - maybe even lowe than the 350MB suggested, thus allowing more for the 'superusers' who seem to eat as much (and more)as they are given.

We will look into LVM - not something with which we are familiar, and maybe come back for any clarification if that is Ok.

That may also help with our understaning of backups.

Is the principle similar to Moodle - ie backup 3 things - script/website, database and file storage area?

I have seen staff and student guides to Mahara - are there any docs for system admins? (or are they in the download)

thanks
http://mahara.org/interaction/forum/topic.php?id=57

Activity type: [[type11/activity]] at 10 December 2008,  9:30 AM

Hello and thanks for prompt response.

Our estimate is based on LAN usage which has run out mopre than once over recent years (even after increasgin disk capacity) as more muiltimedia work is undertaken, though I take your point on many users underutilisieng what is made available to them. I guess it is finding the optimum limit to place on the storage quota - maybe even lowe than the 350MB suggested, thus allowing more for the 'superusers' who seem to eat as much (and more)as they are given.

We will look into LVM - not something with which we are familiar, and maybe come back for any clarification if that is Ok.

That may also help with our understaning of backups.

Is the principle similar to Moodle - ie backup 3 things - script/website, database and file storage area?

I have seen staff and student guides to Mahara - are there any docs for system admins? (or are they in the download)

thanks
http://mahara.org/interaction/forum/topic.php?id=57

Activity type: [[type11/activity]] at 10 December 2008,  9:30 AM

Hello and thanks for prompt response.........
 

10 December 2008, 18:10

Hehe, that looks.. broken

I'll file a bug. 

11 December 2008, 10:40

Talking about email bugs.... I am not receiving notifications from Mahara in the last two days. I checked that my mail server is not full.

 Does anybody else have the same problem or is our mail server?

Regards

11 December 2008, 16:03

It's your mailserver. We have been receiving bounce emails from it . I sent you a message about this, but naturally the email didn't get through!

15 June 2009, 14:43

Hi,

I'm not experiencing the same problem - obviously, as it has been fixed a long time ago ;-) - but I would still like to re-open this thread for a slightly different question. As you can see in David's example, the digest does not offer a lot of information about who wrote the post (unless you sign it) and to which thread it belongs (unless you follow the link). 

Moodle's digest is an example of a nice solution because you get the forum entries similar to how they are displayed online with the breadcrumbs to the forum thread, a picture of the person posting the entry and also their name. This helps to identify the post and also to put it into context without having to go to the site itself.

In Mahara, it seems like that a subject header is enclosed in the email digest when a new forum thread is opened, but not later on when one just replies (without setting a subject?). However, I think the thread should still be itentified in the digest. Having a name there to associate it with would help as well. A picture is a plus for "visual people".

Is the Mahara digest bare-bones intentionally or did I miss a radio button in my settings saying "I want to receive HTML formatted digests"?

Kristina

15 June 2009, 19:54

Mahara's messages are bare-bones because we did them in a rush in the initial development of Mahara back in 2006, and haven't touched them significantly since

So yes, they do look simplistic. I think we're only sending text versions of the mails, and no HTML attachments. It would be nice to one day get around to adding them.

There's other things we should probably do to the notification system too. It's a bit hidden under Settings, and doesn't provide nice ways to categorise the mail (e.g. if you get notifications by e-mail, it probably makes sense for them to never show up in your 'inbox' - even if they do end up available somewhere, like a 'all notifications' page).

The killer feature would be if people could reply to the e-mails to send replies. That would be useful for the forums, and also for private messages. We had to stop showing the message to people in private messages, because too many people were replying to the message, and that goes to a noreply address!

Anyway.. so in short, I agree it would be nice to do nicer messages

18 June 2009, 13:15

Hi Nigel,

text-only messages are fine, too, if they include the most necessary information like the name of the person who wrote the post and to which forum thread it belongs.

Kristina

18 August 2009, 1:52

Thanks for adding the default forum topic to the email digest if no subject is set. It makes reading the messages much easier. Even text-only is fine then.

18 August 2009, 18:32

Actually, Richard just added HTML email to master, so you will get those in 1.2 . Though, they're just a simple display, as Richard said that in Moodle, they include a fancy stylesheet that was making the e-mails take a while to load. So we might add one in future, but would be careful to make sure it didn't get too big.

19 August 2009, 5:31

Yeah, the Moodle digests always take a while to load and every odd week there is an email in just plain text for whatever reason. I'd say: keep the HTML version for the mails simple. It doesn't have to be the same stylesheet as the main page, IMHO, but corporate design people may differ on that with me. ;-)