Bug #3954
closedIssues with Email notifications for Groups w/RSS Feeds attached
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Description
Per our email exchange, email notifications for groups w/RSS feeds turned on contain special characters for quotations and no blank lines between paragraphs.
Here is what you said:
"I think this is a problem with our HTML / plain-text email plugin.
"I'm guessing this problem is a plain-text only issue and not a problem with the HTML version of the email. Am I right to assume this? If so, I have an idea of how to address this.
"The futures.gc.cuny.edu site was probably added as an external RSS feed in the Futures Initiative group on CAC, which is how this email was sent out."
Updated by Raymond Hoh about 9 years ago
- Status changed from Assigned to Reporter Feedback
Hi Matt,
I tested email notifications with HTML entities like:
… – &
in regular email notifications and they render properly in plain-text.
Next, I looked at how the External Group Blogs RSS plugin was recording items into the group activity stream and it turns out that we have an existing ticket - #459 - dealing with disabling email notifications for External Group Blogs. However, this code was not working correctly.
I've added a fix for #459 to properly disable email notifications for activity items generated by the External Group Blogs plugin in commit 0be299.
However, let me know if we want to reinstate emails for items generated by the External Group Blogs RSS plugin. If that is the case, I'll need to look into the plain-text encoding problem for this plugin some more.
Updated by Boone Gorges about 9 years ago
- Target version changed from 1.7.17 to 1.7.18
Updated by Matt Gold about 9 years ago
Thanks, Ray. I guess the issue here is whether we think group admins who add RSS feeds do so because they want members to receive such email notifications or whether they expect to see them as part of the group interface on the web only.
Since all other group info is conveyed by email notification, my assumption is that people expect to be notified via email, so I think we should look at that.
However, I think we can and should both make this easier on ourselves and clarify the origin of the posts by doing the following:
-- create an email notification for each post that comes in via an added RSS feed
-- do not provide full text of the post, but rather either an excerpt or a link to the original post
-- make the provenance of the post clear (ie, that it came in from an external source, not the attached group blog)
cc'ing Samantha on this for her thoughts
Updated by Raymond Hoh about 9 years ago
- Status changed from Reporter Feedback to Resolved
Hi Matt,
My initial thoughts (#3954-2) about the Futures Initiative BP group using the External Group Blogs plugin were wrong.
As in #459, activity items recorded by the External Group Blogs never sends email notifications. So what you mention in comment 4 (#3954-4) is not applicable at the moment, but we could look at this in a separate ticket.
Pertaining to this ticket, the following is what is actually happening:
- The Futures Initiative BuddyPress group uses BP Groupblog
- The Futures Initiative BP Groupblog is linked to the futures.commons.gc.cuny.edu site.
- On the futures.commons.gc.cuny.edu site, the FeedWordPress plugin is activated. The FeedWordPress plugin is a plugin that allows site admins to include RSS feeds, which are then added individually as WP posts.
- One of the FI site admins added the futures.gc.cuny.edu RSS feed to FeedWordPress.
- BP Groupblog, then, takes the RSS posts and records the post to the group activity feed.
- The BP Group Email Subscription plugin, then, sends out this post for those subscribed to "All Mail".
I got confused between what was happening with the External Group Blogs plugin vs. BP Groupblog / FeedWordPress.
For this ticket, I've added a fix so groupblog activity content with HTML entities are properly decoded for plain-text emails in commit 3a541a7cb7.
I would also recommend removing the External Group Blogs RSS feed for the Futures Initiative BP group because there is no reason to have two RSS feeds with the same content being used -- the first is from External Group Blogs and the other is from the Groupblog site via the FeedWordPress plugin.
One other thing to note is currently, HTML emails do not work outside the main Commons site as we have not network-activated the WP Better Emails / WP Better Emails for BP plugins. The reason why we probably didn't network-activate these plugins is this might interfere with sites that already have existing email solutions or that we do not want to force the main Commons HTML template on all sites. I'm not sure what we want to do regarding this, but since we haven't really received many tickets about this issue, it's probably best to leave things as-is for the time being.
I'm marking this ticket as resolved, but feel free to discuss the issues here or open new tickets for some of them.
Updated by Matt Gold about 9 years ago
Raymond Hoh wrote:
The reason why we probably didn't network-activate these plugins is this might interfere with sites that already have existing email solutions or that we do not want to force the main Commons HTML template on all sites. I'm not sure what we want to do regarding this, but since we haven't really received many tickets about this issue, it's probably best to leave things as-is for the time being.
That sounds right to me. Thanks, Ray, for that and for untangling this issue!