Support

Current behavior:
Discussions and collaborations between members can currently only be handled online (within forum or blog pages)

Desired behavior:
Listserv functionality where members can mail-in comments and receive email summaries of all comments

Notes:
1) The biggest challenge is how to enable this without overloading our servers with email traffic. This can ramp up quickly.
2) We are starting the work on forum email notifications, this handles this need at least partially.
 

---

Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

Zero votes for me on this. I'm worried about the load. If you implement email notifications for the forums, you will essentially accomplish most of this.

Email notifications of new postings to online forums are a sound solution. I actually want my members to go to our website, and notification message achieves that. If the full message was displayed in the email notification, I would fear some key members forgetting about the site.

I hope that the email notification provides a link to the appropriate forum. 

I agree with the previous comments.  Having email notifications from forums is better and accomplishes the same objective.

Since we have implemented forum email notifications and given the comments received so far, we have decided to move listserv feature to wishlist for now.

---

Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

Dear Apricots, please don't discard this solution. I think it's very, very important.

Discussion fora are no substitute for listservs.  They serve different functions. If you ask a user to open a browser, navigate, and sign-in every time they want to post a question/comment, it's not going to happen. Even less-so is the chance of another user reading and answering /responding to it.

Consider this: even the best email campaigns have open rates of only 32% and click-rates of 10% or less. Somewhere in-between the openers and the clickers are the emailers. And, there's lots and lots of them. Outlook is already open and on your desktop. Insert address and go.

Of course, if your site doesn't lend itself to this kind of solution, you would simply not opt for it and leave just a discussion forum.

Cheers!

Bradley H. Spurr

While I was one who supported the use of email notifications instead of listserv, I was disappointed that this feature by default is opt-in and not opt-out for individual users (or at least not over-rideable by Administrators). I mention this because like the observation above, most of my board members couldn't be bothered to each log in and change their configuration setting for my WA website's Discussion Forum, but have asked why I can't do it for them. I *could* reset all their passwords to do this, etc., but that misses the point.

Odd that I can change a user's email address and even delete their entire account, but I can't change a setting on how they wish to interact with a member's only discussion forum.

I add that on other listserv applications I have used, an Administrator has such powers.

Please allow Administrators to set user settings for WA Discussion Forum pages. Many thanks.

I agree with the need for the Administrator to choose either opt-in or opt-out.  The latter is certain to be much more effective.

Gary

I agree with allanleonard and Gary Mooney that admins should be able to control forum email subscriptions.  In my case, I'm migrating our members to our new feature-rich Wild Apricot site from multiple services (blog, database, Yahoo group) in order to decomplicate things.  I'm able to make it relatively seamless for them *except* for this one deficiency. 

200 of our nearly 1000 members are signed up on the Yahoo Group that we're transitioning over to the WA-based discussion forum, and I would have preferred to just set them up myself with their previously-stated preferences for frequency of mailing (immediate, daily, weekly).  Instead, I run the risk of losing some of those people from our discussions because of the extra (albeit easy) step involved of resubscribing.

Additionally, is there any way to find out how many members are signed up for a discussion forum?  And who?  The only way to do this now, that I can see, is by going member-by-member to viewing each person's subscription.

Knowing how many people (and which ones) are using the forum subscriptions would be a good guide as to how beneficial the service is for the overal group.  Even if it forums are accessible without being subscribed for the emails, knowing the number of subscriptions would let us know if people are dedicated to getting the updates therein.

A list serv solution is VERY important to us.  We currently have to utilize several different outsourced options to acheive our different methods of communicating with members which is costly and confusing to members as they have multiple places to login for features.  In an effort to streamline everything, we'd love to see this implemented.  We have used a message board (similar to what is offered on Wild Apricot) and a listserve and there is no question our members prefer the listserv's ease of use by a factor of 9 to 1.  Anything that helps the members communicate with each other more easily is good business for us.  We are here to serve our members.  After all, isn't that what we're supposed to be focussing on rather than what's easier for us...?

Couldn't this option be, well, optional for those who desperately want it?

 

I agree, the posts in opposition to listserv functionality are from the administration viewpoint not the users.  We have a neighborhood association, have signed up with WildApricot, but don't believe we'll have an effective transition of membership from utilizing the current yahoo groups list serve.  You'll notice that many many forums fail to maintain usage from users, its just too much to ask for most people to login to a site for a casual area of their life.   That may change when people have their own personal websites where they can attach sites and forums (like gadgets on igoogle).  In the meantime, those who like the ease of having information pushed at them with the ability to quickly respond in their email client is vital.  One of our members is involved with another membership organization and they tried a forum style (don't think it was WildApricot), but interaction died so they're going back to their yahoo group.

A listserv function would be very useful for our organization, especially if it had a "moderator" function.  We currently outsource this; having Wild Apricot do it would help consolidate things.