2018-06-26, 12:01 PM
I migrated my forum www.nzarchitecture.nt.nz from an old Yahoo Groups email chatlist, and in the process have lost the active participation of many of my users, who find the need to open a browser, let alone log in to anything, too much of a bother.
(this is mostly from an older demographic, who's crowning IT achievement seems to have been the mastery of email back in the 90's)
There is also strong disappointment expressed that the ability to spontaneously reply to a forum post at the same time and in the same way that they would respond to any other email message has been lost, and they lament that they cannot have all subsequent responses appearing conveniently in their inboxes in real time - they have to log back in every time because any follow up notifications are suspended until they do.
In a nutshell, they tell me there has been a loss of spontaneity that defeats the purpose for them.
I commissioned a private developer to make a plugin that emails a digest summary of all recent posts at regular intervals, which partially addresses notifications - but there is still not the immediacy and familiarity die hard email users want.
Under the current version of MyBB, has anyone come up with a way to achieve the best of both worlds? - i.e. without sacrificing the management benefits, searchability etc of an online forum, also providing an email chat list option for those who only want to to interact by email?
There was an old plugin that purportedly did this , but it was abandoned long ago as I understand it.
(this is mostly from an older demographic, who's crowning IT achievement seems to have been the mastery of email back in the 90's)
There is also strong disappointment expressed that the ability to spontaneously reply to a forum post at the same time and in the same way that they would respond to any other email message has been lost, and they lament that they cannot have all subsequent responses appearing conveniently in their inboxes in real time - they have to log back in every time because any follow up notifications are suspended until they do.
In a nutshell, they tell me there has been a loss of spontaneity that defeats the purpose for them.
I commissioned a private developer to make a plugin that emails a digest summary of all recent posts at regular intervals, which partially addresses notifications - but there is still not the immediacy and familiarity die hard email users want.
Under the current version of MyBB, has anyone come up with a way to achieve the best of both worlds? - i.e. without sacrificing the management benefits, searchability etc of an online forum, also providing an email chat list option for those who only want to to interact by email?
There was an old plugin that purportedly did this , but it was abandoned long ago as I understand it.