Approved Please bring back Digest feature

Sunka · Nov 12, 2020

Like some users also post on xenforo forum:

[DBTech] DragonByte Mail [Paid]

This is not true at all. I have it working with the bounce management, you just have to setup the bounce notification topic in SES and send it to an email address you use for XF's bounce handling. Could you please share how you do this step by step or post a link to a description to it...

xenforo.com

[DBTech] DragonByte Mail [Paid]

This is not true at all. I have it working with the bounce management, you just have to setup the bounce notification topic in SES and send it to an email address you use for XF's bounce handling. Could you please share how you do this step by step or post a link to a description to it...

xenforo.com

I also agree with opinion that Digest users should be back

BigIron · Nov 12, 2020

I couldn't agree more, huge disappointment that it was removed. If anything, it should have been built out to expand on XF's Activity Summary Email features (which are extremely limited).

Here's what we're looking for, for our newsletter.

Auto generated content from sections we specify, with ability for members to include/exclude sections of their choosing. DB Mail's digest feature used to do this.
Ability for us to set criteria for which threads are pulled (most views, most replies, newest, etc). Bonus if members can specify this.
The ability for each member to set the interval at which they receive the newsletter.
Ability for us to customize/monetize via messages or ads at the top or bottom.
Include other types of content (classifieds, resources, events, media)

We've been looking for years and the digest feature of DB Mail was the closest thing we found (before the digest feature was removed), so we bought it, hoping that it would evolve over time to do more of what we wanted (content types were promising).

ichpen · Nov 28, 2020

Ditto. Cross posted from XF. The feature you should've removed was your inactivity email which is directly replaced by XFs Activity email NOT the digest which is very different. Now that I've read up on XF 2.2 and used it, the native Activity Email feature is in no way a replacement for a proper digest.

swiftyste · Dec 3, 2020

I agree I was thinking of buying but after reading that this has been removed I will hold off buying it, this is far better then any other digests add-ons some members don't like change and the same comes with activity email.

ichpen · Dec 22, 2020

Any decision or ETA on bringing back the digest feature? A few of my users are a little peeved by this.

Fillip H. · Dec 28, 2020

I'm about to release v4.6.0b1 which restores the Digest feature as it was. For those who have upgraded to v4.5.0, old digest configuration, subscription status and log entries etc will be lost, though those upgrading from v4.4 will keep this data intact.

I'm going to include the rest of this post in the release notes as well.

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Firstly, I want to apologise for how this happened and how I handled this. I did not adequately communicate my plans to remove this feature, and as a result I did not give people a chance to voice their feedback. I arrogantly assumed that people used Digests in an entirely different way (as a way to bring back old, lapsed users), and I did not consider that people might have purchased Mail exclusively for this feature.

To everyone affected by this: I'm sorry. I will do better in the future.
Going forward, if I ever think a XenForo feature supersedes an add-on feature, I will post my plans to remove the feature as an update in the resource @ XenForo.com.

Secondly, I'd like to share the roadmap for the Digest feature going forward.
Beta 1: Restoration of the Digest feature as it was in v4.4
Beta 2: Replace the current "Content type" sections with a custom implementation of the Activity Summary sections
Beta 3: Address feedback with the new "Content type" sections

The reason for replacing the existing "Content type" section with an implementation of "Activity Summary" sections is that not only will it better support core XenForo / official add-ons, but other 3rd party add-ons will likely add support for the "Activity Summary" feature going forward. Being able to automatically support this in DB Mail would be a net benefit.

Unfortunately I cannot give an ETA for when Beta 2+ will be released, since it's going to be a significant amount of work. I will start work on it as soon as Beta 1 is released.