following entire discussion board, not just topic

[Nate Aune]

We have a customer who would like to get an email every time a new discussion is posted to the forum. In other words, they need a way to assign a moderator or group of moderators that automatically get email updates when there are any new posts to a discussion board. 

From the edX documentation (http://edx.readthedocs.org/projects/edx-partner-course-staff/en/latest/running_course/discussions_students.html#keep-up-with-new-activity), it would appear that you can only follow a post and receive an email digest of the posts you're following, not get an email of all posts to a board. 

This customer does not want to check the discussion board daily/hourly. They assigned a particular user as a moderator and thought that the moderator would receive email updates when new posts were added to the discussion board, but this doesn't seem to be the case.

Has anyone configured edX to send an email on every post to the discussion board? I realize that this would result in a barrage of emails, if you were running a 100,000 student MOOC course, but these courses have much smaller number of students participating, so they won't have that problem.

thanks,

Nate

[Chris Dodge]

Hi Nate,

Our team here is heads down working on a Notification system for Open edX, and from the sounds of your requirements, you might be able to build on top of it to provide this functionality. Sorry, I don't really have a public doc on the feature ready, but I'll work to transfer over some of the design documents over to a public Wiki page when I get a breather from coding.

In short, you will be able build Notification Triggers in the Open edX stack and deliver the notifications over different Notification Channels, such as "in-browser", triggered emails (sent immediately), email digests, SMS, as well as Mobile push notifications. Also, the implementation will support multiple back-ends storage providers, but we will be eyeing an initial storage provider to be SQL-based.

The trick for you will be regarding timing, as this will be a long effort and our initial MVP will be focusing on in-browser notifications first, then triggered emails. Other channels will be developed after that.

When do you need to deliver this functionality to your customer?

If you want to follow-along in the development, see the edx/edx-notifications repo. The repo is only about 1 week old and there is a lot of code churn happening right now, so I would not suggest using/building on top of this now. You can also follow work progress at the "Solutions" project in the public JIRA.

Again, it's early going. I'd estimate that it will be another month before there is enough for you to really dig into.

Thanks for your interest,

Chris Dodge

@edx.org

[Nate Aune]

Hi Chris,

Our team here is heads down working on a Notification system for Open edX, and from the sounds of your requirements, you might be able to build on top of it to provide this functionality. Sorry, I don't really have a public doc on the feature ready, but I'll work to transfer over some of the design documents over to a public Wiki page when I get a breather from coding.

Thanks for your reply and apologies for the delay in responding. Did you get a chance to transfer over the design documents to a public wiki page? I'd love to take a closer look at the notifications systems and see if it will work for our customers (yes, now there are two who both need it).

  

The trick for you will be regarding timing, as this will be a long effort and our initial MVP will be focusing on in-browser notifications first, then triggered emails. Other channels will be developed after that.

Are there now email notifications or still only in-browser notifications? In your estimation, how much work would it be to add email notifications?

 

When do you need to deliver this functionality to your customer?

It's becoming more urgent now as both customers are launching courses and concerned that people will be posting to the forums, but they won't receive emails to know that someone has posted.

 

If you want to follow-along in the development, see the edx/edx-notifications repo. The repo is only about 1 week old and there is a lot of code churn happening right now, so I would not suggest using/building on top of this now. You can also follow work progress at the "Solutions" project in the public JIRA.

I found this page in JIRA which outlines edx-solutions contributions to push back upstream, but I didn't see notifications mentioned in this list. 

https://openedx.atlassian.net/wiki/display/SOL/Solutions+to+Open+edX+Contribute+back

I can see in Github that there's been work done on the codebase, but where can I find more info about the features notifications and implementation details in the wiki?

Again, it's early going. I'd estimate that it will be another month before there is enough for you to really dig into.

Do you think at this point it's stable enough to use in production?

thanks,

Nate

[Chris Dodge]

Hi Nate,

Very good timing with your question. Yes, in fact, we actually shipped our Notifications MVP release to a customer last week in fact, so it is stable for production, but it's "design center" is for small-to-medium sized Open edX instances. We're finishing up Phase 2 of the project which are daily/weekly digest emails of Notifications, which will be released to our customer in May.

While the "engine" is fully developed on edx/edx-notifications (the digests work is on a branch: cdodge/notification-digest), the integration into the LMS/Studio is in our team's fork: edx-solutions/edx-platform. The Integration work primarily is around implementing Notification Triggers (e.g. "when User A responds to a forum post of User B, send user B a notification", "when course author posts a new Course Update, send a notification to all enrolled students", etc.). If you are interested, I can send you the (closed) main PR regarding that integration work in edx-solutions/edx-platform.

Phase 3 will be to migrate the integration into Open edX. I'd like to see it make it into the "C release" of Open edX, but a number of teams here would have to be involved to get there, so I can't really commit to that right now.

Right now we support "durable in-browser" notifications, plus the notification digests. We been asked by others in the Open edX community to implement a "fire-and-forget" Email Notification Channel (using the parlance of the architecture in edx-notifications) which I don't think would take longer than a week or two to implement (mainly since we are already building email digests). I'll let you know if we are able to take it on in the near future.

So, I guess my answers are a bit complicated and all depends on your timing. You could:

- take edx/edx-notifications now (well, I'd suggest you wait for digests to land first on master in maybe 2 weeks) and apply the relevant diffs in our LMS/Studio fork to your fork (you might even try cherry-picking our integration commit hash and seeing how much you need to resolve). You'll also have to come up with some suitable .css styling as the styles we originally developed is specific to our customers visual skinning.

- wait for an official release in a Open edX named release

If you take the former route, I think one gotcha that you should be aware of might be when trying to rebase against - say - a future "C Release" and having to resolve any conflicts.

Regarding technical documentation, I have that in my current sprint workload, so you should expect to see some technical (not end-user) documentation over the next few days on the edx/edx-notifications Wiki.

Hope that answers some of your questions. Happy to talk more about this if you want.

Best wishes,

Chris

[Nate Aune]

If anyone from the edX team is reading this, I would like to know if there has been any recent improvements to the email notifications feature of the discussion forum, to optionally send email notifications when a new post is submitted to the forum, and not just to the discussion threads that you're already subscribed to.

[Robert Raposa]

Hi Nate.

Enhanced notifications are actively being discussed.  I'm not certain what the initial use cases will cover, but this particular case can certainly be reviewed.

Thanks.

Robert

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[Nate Aune]

Before we start building anything for our customers, it would be helpful to know if edX is making any improvements to the enhanced notifications, so we don't step on each other's toes. thanks! Nate