Re: Need a little more info about Nabble

Posted by GregChapman on Jul 27, 2016; 8:48am
URL: https://support.nabble.com/Need-a-little-more-info-about-Nabble-tp7596953p7596963.html

Hi Tom,

Tom Swan wrote

a forum could be the idea compromise. Users can elect, I assume, to be notified if a certain topic is revisited -- that's the functionality I would want.

One of the major features of a Nabble forum is that it is possible to interact with it entirely via email. One just subscribes to the topic, sub-forum or forum of interest and you'll get the complete post via email - to which you can reply and it will then appear on the forum. It means you can use Nabble to produce a mail list with a very neat archive of previous posts. You could also make this an "announcement list", with replies disallowed, so you could post links to any significant updates anywhere on your site. (That's done by removing the "Create_topic" and "Reply" permissions for ordinary users of the forum. Obviously, subscribers might reply by email, but they'd just go into a black hole as the forum would refuse to accept the email as a post.)

There is no method available by default for just receiving notifications to encourage subscribers to visit the forum although any email received through a subscription does include a link in its footer that will take you directly to the topic in question.  Although, if into NAML coding, you could edit the appropriate macros to replace the contents of the full contents of any post with a general message confirming to subscribers that a post has been made, so turning subscriptions into the simple notifications you want.

Having a forum with some users responding via email can turn out to be a real pain. As most people using email always top-post replies over a full thread of previous replies. For visitors to the forum it can then be very difficult to see simple one line responses in amongst a forest of quoted text. You can find yourself with a huge management overhead editing all the emailed replies to remove the unwanted quotes in emailed replies.