Imported from previous forum
The old site defaulted to including the prior post's text when posting a reply (with >> symbols in the text box, and the poster could remove). The emails coming from the new site are terribly difficult to dicipher and understand the context around "Done" and other such responses (even the lengthy/descriptive replies), unless one has read every post in sequence, and is mentally differentiating the various topic trails simulatenously ongoing.
The actual email message content itself is chock full of lots of text and links but it is rather difficult to easily see the 'real data'. I'm assuming we're intentionally sending out plain text vs. html (otherwise URLs for the profile of the poster could be a hyperlink on "Ken Yeadon", as could the "Discussion Category: ____", and the topic itself). I much preferred the old site's more condensed heading/footing for these. Frankly, I don't need/nor want it to say "Hi Scott Atwell,".
The email subjects filling up my inbox view are also quite lengthy (twice as long as the old site's). The bottom line, from my perspective, is that these are harder to read, and much harder to 'follow'.
Thanks for the input Scott- We want to collate feedback and come up with something considered that takes the superset of preferences into account and deals with as many as possible, so would like to take a few days to consider before we put anything into effect- FPL will also need to formally approve the proposal to give an official position, rather than us responding ad hoc to requests from end-users, as cosyt of change on this stuff is quite high.
We could make the sytntax more concise for the footer stuff- its is driven by an algorithm that reflects, user, action, event, subject, object etc, depending on the message so each message is constructed dynamically from a template, them there are permutations to address grammatical rules such as "an event" vs "a blog", and possessives such as "Tom's" vs "Lucas' " etc, so these need to be changed cautiously and the syntax chosen carefully, but they are highly configurable, so we should be able to work something out that provides a more abbreviated form eventually.
Plain text vs RTF or HTML is an interesting one. Historically a lot of mail clients blocked or stripped HTML from e-mails, so there was a premium on plain text for "transactional" e-mail, but increasingly newer email clients handle plain text interpretively, and HTML mail is becoming more of a norm since its used so widely, so its a tricky balance to get right. It also has implications for terms of service for mass-mail infrastructure such as Sendgrid or Mandrill for managing IP reputation and compliance- its obvioulsy important we do that well or the notifications start to end up in the spam folder. Data quality is a big consideration, and the validity of the e-mails in the migrated data is not great- its already put a dent in our IP reputation, so we will need to do something to address the redundant/obsolete e-mail addresses and domains fairly soon to stop this being an issue.
Ideally we would propose an idiom for these as a subset of what is possible, for discussion amongst this group, and change it when there is a clear consensus / mandate, with a clear mandate, rather than fighting with a proliferation of ad-hoc changes in response to individual feedback, so its good to get some opinions expressed, even if they are conflicting! Some themes will emerge!
I agree with everything Scott says above.
Why was this actually even changed in the first place?
I know this is an old thread, but Ken, I raised similar issues with you via phone that Scott raised. 100% of the time those emails that come into my inbox get filtered away into a different folder I rarely even look at it because if I cannot discern the topic within the first 5 to 10 words in the subject line I don't read it. The way the Subject line even shows up today is impossible to determine what the thread even is about. This is something that must change to be more user friendly.