Conversation System: Add email notifications for comments

[vladolaru]

As a rule of thumb, for communication to succeed, both the sender and the receiver must be able to maintain a flow of information from and to each other.

In terms of an online conversation based on asynchronous communication, there should be a way to notify each party that the other has responded to its message.

This is usually done through email notifications that encourage the receiver to continue the conversation.

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Plugins available:

• Comment Reply Email Notification by Arno Welzel
  • Simple options: checked by-default, GDPR checkbox and policy link
• Lightweight Subscribe To Comments by Isabel Castillo
• Replyable by Postmatic
  • Hourly, daily digest (Comment flood control)
  • Clean solution and easy to use; good notification content
• Subscribe To Comments Reloaded by WPKube
  • Very complex for our purpose

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Issue related to #268

[georgeolaru]

I did my diligence research to discover the main jobs-to-be-done from a user perspective:

1. The comment author wants needs to know when the article author or someone else replies to its comment, so the communication loop between the sender and the receiver continues and the conversation is evolving.
2. A commenter that steps into a conversation and writes a reply to a current thread, wants to stay in contact with the whole conversation.
3. A reader wants to know where the conversations are going, without involving in writing its opinion in the comments.

To limit our purpose but making the experience better, I think we should narrow the solution to the first item and automatically notify the comment authors only about replies to their comments. The other two items from the list involve a higher level of complexity and 3rd party plugins might be needed to control all the use-cases.

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I draw a comment notification scheme to see which users receive notifications and when. You can find it here and you can explore further variations if needed:

Starting from this motivation, I propose a set of guidelines that the solution should aim for.

Emails notifications triggers:

• Send an email notification automatically to the Comment Author for all the subsequent replies to its comment. (examples of email notification for a new comment)
• Provide an option in Settings → Discussion to stop sending notification emails for comment replies

Emails content:

• Provide a one-click unsubscribe link inside the email content
• Provide a reply link for easier comment form navigation

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@vladolaru That’s my call on this matter. Now it’s up to you to decide if we should use a plugin or (better) you can load the functionality from an existing one. Let me know when you need my additional input or feedback.

[vladolaru]

@georgeolaru Very good analysis and wrap-up. I'll get to it.

[georgeolaru]

@vladolaru Just remembered a mention here regarding the Falcon project for Email Notifications (by Human Made) — maybe it helps.