CUNY Academic Commons

I would gladly take suggestions for a better email message when a message fails to post.

For reference, this is the message that Lisa received when her topic failed to post:

Hi there,

Your new forum topic:

[body of message]

Could not be posted because it appears that you do not have access to that forum.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

The problem with the text for the message is that it quotes the entire body of the message, not just the subject of the message or "forum topic." If the message is a long one, as mine was, then the second half of the message that reads: "could not be posted..." doesn't appear until you scroll all the way down. Granted, the subject of the email should give it away, but for those people who use email clients where the subject heading is not always visible, this just looks like your seeing your post being distributed.

Probably not a big problem, but maybe simply quoting back the first 50 characters of the message or so would work just as well, as would front loading the error message. For example:
~_~~~~
Hi there:

Unfortunately, your message could not be posted because you do not have access to the forum. We are sorry for the inconvenience, but you will need to repost the following message:

etc. etc.

~_~~~~

I hope that's helpful!

Best,
Lisa

Hi All --

Just wanted to give this a bump. Lisa says that the message saying that the message failed to post still appears at the bottom of the message; she suggests we move it to the top of the message so that the fact that the message failed is more obvious to users

I like Lisa's suggested text. I think moving the error alert to the top will be a huge help here!
Let me know if any further UX input is needed for this.