Attachments

It is now possible to upload images – up to 5 per post – when adding a message. Note that the image size limit is half a megabyte. You may need to first make the image smaller before uploading – a lot of digital cameras store images at very large sizes, these would quickly overload the web hosting.

The image shouldn’t appear in Gmail. That is beyond the scope of what the forum can do, currently.

The messages which go out notify users that there is a new forum message. Visiting that message will reveal the content of that message.

In almost no case will users be able to interact with the message in any useful way without actually visiting the forum. For example, to post a reply, or look at uploaded images.

The email itself does not contain any file uploaded to the message itself, and indeed only contains a description of what the message itself contains in order to make life simpler for users, meaning they can devine the content without having constantly to visit the website.

It is possible, however, for it to do this.

On a wider, but not unrelated, point, I think I understand some of the issues which have been described. It is clear there is a slight disconnect between expected behaviour and what the forum / email notification actually does.

Missing Notifications

Several users are not receiving forum notifications.

This is because some email programs are rejecting the automatic mail. Gmail isn’t one such service, but AOL appears to be rejecting the forum messages. This may be to a greater or lesser extent be because two users have left “complaints” with their providers (i.e. by clicking “spam” on a system generated email).

It should not matter whether the follow up notification is ticked, we have overridden this and all users will be sent all messages and replies – as historically happened with the Yahoo system.

However, some email providers appear to be not allowing these messages through. AOL is one. If you have an AOL email address, you may not receive notifications. You may need to whitelist the address the email comes from. Even this may not work. How this would be overcome is therefore a question. It may also be the case that user email(s) are typo’ed. We will dig into this a bit, as around 20% of system emails aren’t being delivered (this is high).

Some Users Reply to Notifications – by Email

It is clear that some users reply to forum notifications by email. Doing this won’t post the reply to the website, rather it will go to the noreply@ address that the emails originate from (i.e. do nothing). We can make a change so that the emails replies go to a mailing group which contains all users, but this is troublesome in one regard, as then there are two sets of “replies”:

1) those that are on the forum; and
2) those replies which went by email to the group.

The two sides cannot be reconciled unless someone then posts them to the messageboard, thereby creating additional work. It might not be a huge problem to do this, as a workaround: have a nominated person putting replies received by email onto the board.

Allowing posting by email is not a straightforward solution, as it is relatively easy for technically savvy spammers and hackers to take advantage of such a system, and fill your forum with junk.

But we will keep investigating the options for doing this.

Proposed Solution

We can setup an email group which contains all the club members. Notifications from the website can be sent via this group. When replies come by email to this group, they will be distributed to all group members.

If the reply could then be posted to the messageboard – by a nominated member – that will reconcile the two. Currently, it would not be straightforward to do this automatically, but we will have a look at how this might work.

I will send Al Cash a brief rundown of how this will work in practice.