What are Discourse Activity Summaries

The Discourse "Activity Summary" (formerly known as the "digest") is an email sent out to any members of your forum who haven't visited in a while. The contents of the summary is a list of the most popular posts & topics created over the past week.

discourse-digest-example.png1912x3134 388 KB

By default this mail is sent out once every week, but users may go to their settings and choose between:

• Daily
• Every three days
• Weekly
• Every two weeks
• Opt out

Users who have not been active on the forum for more than 365 days will stop receiving these emails.

Also note that a user may opt out of digests entirely.

How do you determine the members of your forum who haven't visited in a while? Is there a specific threshold you measure this by? For example, if they haven't visited in 5 days they will receive a digest email? It would be great if we could adjust this in the Email settings!

Thanks for your help.

Melissa,

You can change the default value using the setting default email digest frequency inside e-mail settings.

Also, a user can change the frequency on his/her preferences page.

Hi Rafael,

Thanks for the response. I saw that setting, but I'm confused by the description of the feature. How does Discourse determine if someone "hasn't visited in a while"? Or is this sent to all users based on the default email digest frequency?

Yes, exactly. User get a digest when he hasn't visited for the interval defined on that setting. Maybe a better copy is needed.

Hi @Falco. I'd like to just doublecheck something --

Let's say you have "default email digest frequency" set to Daily:

1. "You haven't visited in a while" is "true" if you haven't visited the site in >24 hours
2. The Activity Summary email goes out every 24 hours

Is this correct? Thanks!

Yes, but only if the user hasn't received any other kind of notification in the last 24 hours.

As admins, we want to be able to track in Google Analytics the traffic to our Discourse from Activity Summary Emais.

Is there any way to append and customize Google Analytics’s UTM params to all links in the Activity Summary Email?

For example:

• utm_source=activity_summary
• utm_medium=email
• utm_content=2017-07-16 (date of the day when email was sent out)

Would love if you shared ideas for any potential solutions.