CUNY Academic Commons

Thanks for the helpful discussion about emails in this month's meeting.

My two cents regarding the email subject: Adding the author to the subject might not be necessary because the "From" email header should already contain the post author's name.

I also agree that the group name should be placed more prominently in the subject. Perhaps we can use the group slug instead of the group name in the email subject line since the group slug is generally shorter than the group name?

eg. [cac-community-team-project-planning] A reply was added to the topic "2016-2017 Friday Meeting Dates"

instead of:

"Boone Gorges" replied to the topic "2016-2017 Friday Meeting Dates" in the forum "CUNY Academic Commons Team"

This might also increase the usage to customize the group slug (or group link as we call it) (#307). So if more group admins decide to use this feature, we should make sure that group slug customization works the way we intend it to from a UX perspective.

Re: the salutation: it's a bit awkward to print the recipient's full name... this, combined with the large font size, prompt a spammy feel. Maybe just the first name?

I agree that just the first name would be great.

I like the idea of using the group slug. The body of the message would still state the name of the person who replied, right?

A potential wrinkle for just using first names: I don't think we store them in a structured way at the moment. See #2325. This may be a good opportunity to address that ticket.

Circling back to this, can we come to some consensus for some items in this ticket?

• Subject line - What format do we want to use?
• Email "From" name - Currently, this is set to the post author's name. Should this be changed to something else like "Author Name (CUNY Academic Commons)"?
• Salutation - Changing this to use the first name requires #2325 to be fixed first. Or we can change the salutation to something else.

I'm going to make the following changes to group forum emails unless I receive any other feedback:

• Subject line - Removing [CUNY Academic Commons] and replacing with either the group name or group slug
• From name - Changing this from Author Name to Author Name (CUNY Academic Commons)
• Salutation - Remove the "Hi X" line entirely.

that looks good to me Ray-- thanks!