Priority of "New topics only" and "Replies after you" settings

Hi there

First up, apologies for bothering you guys again. GES is awesome, everyone loves the community I’ve built, and the plugin and does 90% of what I need – just not quite…

So I’ve done some more testing, and it appears the email notifications are working differently for activity updates and forum posts.

Here’s how my users would like it to work:
? Email notification on the first post in a new conversation
? Email notification for subsequent posts, if the first post was theirs or if they have replied to that conversation

I’m currently using BBPress forums within BP groups (with activity updates effectively disabled by hiding the relevant controls with CSS), and I thought this was how it would work with the forums – i.e. that on a post by post basis, the global BP settings for “A member replies in a forum topic you’ve started” and “A member replies after you in a forum topic” would override the GES settings, so that users could leave both of these on, and set the group to New Topics. However this isn’t how it works – these two settings are effectively ignored with GES (same applies to digests and No email).

Then I tried the same thing with Activity updates, and hey presto, the GES settings are overridden by the two global settings – so that even if I’m on No email in GES, I still get notifications on my activity updates and comments on updates I’ve commented on. Trouble is, this won’t work either, because New topics only applies to new forum topics and not new activity updates.

So here’s what I’d like (in order of preference):
1. Global notification settings for forums to override GES settings, as global settings for activity updates do – that way I could continue to use the forums and set it up how people want;
2. “New topics only” to apply to new activity updates too, so that if set, users get an email on a new activity update, but not on subsequent comments on them (unless the update was theirs or they commented) – that way I could replace the forums with activity updates.
3. Implementation of Follow and Mute from bbPress in GES.

So do you have any plans to implement any of these three, and if so approximate timescales? Appreciate that you might have a long list already!

Harry

Hi Harry,

The options under “Settings > Notifications” are not working with bbPress 2 at the moment:
https://github.com/boonebgorges/buddypress-group-email-subscription/issues/37

It will take some time to port those features back into bbPress 2. In the meantime, the bleeding version of the plugin on Github has removed those features temporarily.

As for your requests:

1. What global settings would you need from GES? The only global activity setting in BP is the ability to disable activity reply commenting.

2. An activity update is not a forum topic. Perhaps on your site it means the same thing, but not from a logistical standpoint.

The other problem is activity updates are tied to the user and not the group. Activity comment email sending is actually handled by BuddyPress not GES.

You will need custom development if you want to achieve this.

3. See:
https://github.com/boonebgorges/buddypress-group-email-subscription/issues/42

No timelines at the moment. The team is always crazy busy, but we’d probably tackle bringing back the options on the “Settings > Notifications” screen and perhaps the Follow / Mute option next.

Hi. Thanks for clarifying. By “global settings” I just meant the “Settings > Notifications” options – global in the sense that they apply in all groups regardless of the GES settings for that group.

Anyway, that development priority works for me. I’ll keep my eye on github.

Thanks

H