02 April 2014, 0:59

Hello,

feedback from our users suggested two minor changes on the notification system:

• notifications about new page access should mention the pages title in the subject
• the emails sent for the notifications should contain the emails text

Has anyone thought about that? Any arguments against that? Is there maybe already a wishlist-item/bug report for that I haven't seen or should I create one?

09 April 2014, 2:34

I'll post the comment from lib.php where the notification content is hidden in the email, to bring an argument into the discussion:

// Do not include the message body in user messages when they are sent by email
// because it encourages people to reply to the email.

I guess that makes sense as long as we don't process email replies like facebook for example does. Although I remember there was a discussion about integrating that. 

Any opinion on the page title in the subject of the page access notification?

09 April 2014, 12:02

Page title in subject: Sounds like a good idea!

Message content in email: Yeah, I've seen that comment in the code as well. I'm not sure I agree with the idea, though. I mean, we send forum post contents out by email, and most of the time users don't get confused by those (although as a Mahara site admin I do get a steady trickle of emails from people trying to respond to forum posts by email). Maybe it would be a good idea to just start out by adding a config-defaults.php setting to allow a site to put direct message contents into the notification email?

Regarding responses by email, yes, that's on the wishlist. See https://bugs.launchpad.net/mahara/+bug/1249895

Cheers,

Aaron