I would like to see the community offer the ability for visitors to subscribe to spaces so if there is activity, they will receive a notice and decide if they want to follow it or not. Otherwise, no one will know to follow convesations or even participate in them.
Bill,
We've had a few meetings recently and discussed this idea thoroughly. Frankly speaking we are not ready to add this feature to Helprace at the moment. We will surely review this suggestion again if it receives wide support in the future.
I wanted to offer you a workaround though.
All activity per space (or "forum", as shown on your screenshot) is shown on a separate page. For example here you can see all activity in your "General" forum:
http://mtc-community.helprace.com/s1-general/all/activity
That page shows all new topcis, replies, and comments.
If you're interested in new topics only, you can see them on the "All Topics" page:
http://mtc-community.helprace.com/s1-general/all/new
Hope this helps!
There is another idea we had. What if normal users (non-agents) also had the same subscription options as the agents do.
You can see these settings in your profile by this link (visible only to you):
http://support.helprace.com/u14-bill-ciccone/emails-notifications
These are global settings (not per space or per forum), but they would let users be notified about activity in the community.
What do you think?
By the way, there is also a question of if these settings should be turned ON or OFF by default for a new user. It seems that OFF should be the default option, because it would be more fair - user didn't signed up to be spammed.
Please share your thoughts about this.
To add to this, we have a mixed community. Some people are intersted in some categories and others not. They would want alerts from various categories (once) and then they can follow or chose not to follow.
Ed and others,
This has become a very important feature. If people are not notified of a new conversation in a Forum without following it, they will never know about it. This is less than a community and more of a bulletin board. I hope you can change this very soon to allow members to be notified of all new activity if they allow it.
Bill
Thank you for an update, Bill! We will surely review your suggestion. This kind of subscription sounds really useful to me.
Edward:
Yes, at this time, when there are new conversations, no one knows about them to follow them in the first place. Without this option, there will be no interaction on the community.
Bill
Any progress on this? I am waiting for some improvement on this before I launch the community to the public.
Not yet, sorry. We're currently focused on development of the ticketing module. Once it is released, we will return to the improvements of the community features.
Okay, keep me posted. Thanks.
Wow, Edward, that is really dissapointing. I see no value in the community if people are not invited or alerted. Not one of my customers would even think to spend their time "fishing" to see if there are any topics of interest. We have to send them alerts and MAYBE, just maybe they will participate. This is devastating to me.
Do you know of any forums or communities that work the way your team is suggesting? I certainly do not but would be interested to know.
Edward at this point, I am not sure this will help me but for the future customers, I personally think this is absolutely critical. Otherwise there is not community. Having said that, I also think it is imperative that members (non employees) can opt in or out of email alerts (notifications) by Forum Category. Also, I think by default, members should be signed up for all alerts and each alert should tell them they can fine tune their alerts to once per day or turn them off so they do not opt out completely.
Thank you for your feedback!
