Customizable welcome email when joining a community

[holyschist]

Title:
Customizable welcome email when joining a community

Area:
communities

Summary:
Community administrators would be able to customize a "getting started" email with posting guidelines, useful links, tips for getting started, etc. that would be autosent upon joining the community, much like the welcome emails sent by listservs.

Description:
While currently it's possible to provide a link to the community profile or a post with posting guidelines when someone joins a community, that's fairly impersonal and brief. I think it would be useful to have an optional feature to send a welcome email that could be customized by the community administrator(s) to help people get started when they join a community, much like the feature on Yahoo!Groups, Google Groups, and other email lists/listservs. This would make it possible to send a "friendlier" welcome message, as well as provide information about participating in the community and useful links not necessarily covered by posting guidelines.

Poll #11272 Customizable welcome email when joining a community

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 57

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
19 (33.3%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
23 (40.4%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
7 (12.3%)

(I have no opinion)
8 (14.0%)

(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Comments

[alexbayleaf]

With changes: message should be sent via DW private message and obey whatever email settings the new member has, rather than just being an email.

I'm thinking about how you would create this message. Would you edit it like a DW sticky post and just point to the post you wanted to be the welcome message? If so, how to deal with the fact that PMs don't allow the full scope of HTML formatting, links, user tags, etc? I'd hate to see a completely separate UI for writing these messages.

So, as a side question: is there a ticket in place for allowing full DW markup in PMs?

[denise]

So, as a side question: is there a ticket in place for allowing full DW markup in PMs?

Can't really be done: PMs are displayed on the www subdomain and therefore the cleaning has to be much stricter, since the www subdomain is where the master cookie lives.

[alexbayleaf]

Ah, ok. So, in that case... I remember talk about themeing user profiles and stuff like that, which presumably we can do because that's http://skud.dreamwidth.org/profile ... is there any reason we can't have http://skud.dreamwidth.org/inbox?

[denise]

No real reason, just a tedious and annoying amount of work :)

[swaldman]

Agreed with this - it seems like a useful function, but not everybody uses email notifications, so it should be possible to use the DW inbox instead.

[kaberett]

+1

[the_shoshanna]

+1

[axiom_of_stripe]

+1

[ursamajor]

This is my "with changes," yep!

[turlough]

+1

[ariestess]

totally agreeing with this change...

[azurelunatic]

My additional changes: the full subscription page (as opposed to the contextual popup where you can subscribe) should mention that this community sends a welcome message upon joining, to make for fewest surprises. If there's a good place for it on the community profile, maybe there also?

In the case of moderated membership, of course, the message would only be sent upon confirmation, not application.

[turlough]

+1

[susanreads]

+1

[ninetydegrees]

+1

[montuos]

+1

[inthetatras]

+1

[cesy]

+1 to these as well as Skud's suggestion.