Hi,
I'm having some problems trying to reach my members. I'm having people stop by the site and then not return. I think it would be have some way in whic the administrators could contact the members via email. Also, if there is a way to send a mass private message. Even if regular members could send messages to multiple members it would be helpful. I would like to have a way to contact all the administrators and send them at once and not have to send it to them separately. So I guess I have 2 separate ideas: a way that administrators can have access to member email addresses and a way for members to contact each others on the site.
So some sort of mailing lists… This would be great indeed. pieterh has also suggested such a thing some times ago. I think that in the simplest form it would be just a "newsletter tool" or sth similar that would allow to send emails (or private messages) to all (or selected) members.
I am not sure about making emails visible to admins. Emails are still somehow private and not everyone is happy with sharing it. But I get your point - I will work on it!
Michał Frąckowiak @ Wikidot Inc.
Visit my blog at michalf.me
Email lists would be very useful.
Admins don't need to see members' email addresses, in fact that's not desirable because if a member changes his address, that creates problems.
Michal: this would be very useful, immediately:
- an email alias wikiname@wikidot.com working as an email list
Initially, just a simple email list with the standard options:
- no moderation
- any member can email to the list
- 100k limit for attachments
- reply-to list
Then, as a later step, you can allow the creation of sub-lists, wikiname-listname@wikidot.com.
And, if you're able, allow this to work with custom domains as well.
Yes, I know… But I can see a few problems here:
- how to identify a user? By an email address? Sorry, this does not work. Too easy to trick. GPG signature? Well, honestly — this is not common and probably will never be.
- custom domains — technically would be no problem but much more convenient way would be to stay within the wikidot.com domain
- forum integration — quite possible
If the first problem is solved — it should be easy after that.
But the easier thing that ucsdgrads has been suggesting is just a possibility to send emails to all the members at once. And this would be much easier since it is one-way only…
Michał Frąckowiak @ Wikidot Inc.
Visit my blog at michalf.me
You would identify users by their login identity. That is, emails would only go to registered users who are members of the site.
A mailing list is therefore:
- a subset of those registered users who are members of the site
- an alias
For security, the same model used by common maillist apps would work - you need to be on the list to post to it. Since people's email addresses are secret, there's no way to discover someone else's address. It's not perfect, but pretty solid.
You'd want to mangle the From and Reply-To headers so that replies go back to the list.
Users should be able to rapidly see all lists on a site, subscribe/unsubscribe to these with a single click. I'd imagine this as a module that can be embedded in any page.