The current behavior is just bad usability. I received an email, I read the subject, I clicked it, I read the message and now instead of knowing the message contents I additionally have to click a link, (look up my password, type it in), log in, wait to be redirected, read the message.
There are situations where I cannot read the forum. Besides the obvious example, many email services provide access via https and phpbb.com and most forums do not, which becomes important if I happen to be on a public wireless network.
I have been on forums where not including message text in emails was considered a feature for a number of reasons, but that sort of thing is specialized enough to really ought to be opt-in instead of the only possible behavior.
I'd say this decision is less important than including the contents, so for version 1 sending original message as it was entered could be acceptable, and then solicit community feedback as to how the messages should be presented. HTML email will allow doing the same bbcode processing as done on boards. Users could indicate whether they want to receive html email as was mentioned.naderman wrote:How would you handle BBCode?
This won't apply to private message text.Unknown Bliss wrote:Also this could render the point of being able to delete messages. For e.g. if someone is swearing, it will be removed before many people see it. If it is subscribed to and included in the email then they know the message already.
For topic notifications, if this is really an issue then perhaps providing a knob to admins to enable/disable sending message text in topic notification emails is the best approach. Then boards that do not need much moderation could enable it, and flamefests could disable it. Maybe even scope the knob to individual forums. Doing a pilot with private messages could demonstrate demand for this functionality, or lack thereof, before the more complex questions related to thread notifications are tackled.
What would you strip out ofDavidIQ wrote: Give the user the option to receive plain text emails or html e-mails. For plain text they would receive the contents of the post with all bbcode stripped out.
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[url=http://xxx]text[/url]