Peyups Enhancement Proposal 1: Enable activity summaries and invites

Continuing the discussion from New Names:

Spinning this off as a proposal para hindi matabunan dun sa isang topic.


PEP: 1
Title: Enable activity summary emails and invitations
Status: Active
Type: Feature
Created: 2020-06-02T10:30:00Z

What are activity summary email and invitations?

Activity summary An automated email which is sent out to members who haven’t visited beyond a specified time period. It contains a collection of the most popular content since their last visit.

Invitations Discourse allows Trust Level 2 (Peyups Addicts in our case) and above users to invite new users to a forum. Users can be invited to join the forum, or to join the forum and be directed to a specific topic.

Why would we want to enable those?

Activity on peyups has been steadily declining. We’re now down to 121 weekly active users (as of this writing). Which gives us about 17 or so daily active users (DAU) though that doesn’t mean all of those post replies or create new topics. Our monthly active users (MAU) is 242 which is on the low side given that we have 1718 registered users.

DAU/MAU: 7%
DAU/Total registered user: 0.9%

The numbers are a bit on the low side. If I recall correctly, a healthy DAU/MAU ratio is about 20% or higher.

If you’re a regular user, you’ll interact with the same ten or so people who frequent the forum. Topics that aren’t of interest to those users don’t get any replies which discourages people from creating new topics.

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Email notifications are a core part of Discourse and are an integral part of retaining users. Enabling the activity summary will hopefully remind inactive users to revisit the site. This should help improve the diversity of the user population as well and will hopefully encourage them to post.

We are competing with apps like Twitter, Facebook, and their ilk for user attention. These apps are very sticky as they constantly bombard their users with notifications. They have also been ingrained in people’s daily habits and routines. The activity summary will be a much needed reminder for those inactive users that yes, peyups still exists and we’re having great conversations here.

Enabling the Invite User feature on the other hand, will help with gaining new users. Since TL2 users are Peyups Addicts, they are already trusted members of the community and any users they invite are already vetted. The system can also track which members invited the new users so the admins will know who invited troublemakers (if it comes to that).

Side note: Enabling the Invite User feature also allow existing users to gain the Promoter, Campaigner, and Champion badges. Which should also incentivize inviting of new users.

Costs and considerations

Enabling activity summaries and user invites will increase the number of emails sent out by peyups and will result in a corresponding increase in site maintenance costs. However, I think it will be worth it if it will result in a more diverse and vibrant community (I’m assuming we all want this).

I say if since we don’t know for sure if these features would be effective so I’m proposing a one month experiment with both features enabled so that admins will be able to collect data which will guide their future decisions. I am volunteering my Mailgun account for this experiment (should it be needed). It has a 20k emails per month allotment which should be enough for the experiment. I’m also willing to shoulder any extra charges should the allotment be exceeded.

I’m really thankful to the admins for reviving this site. I wasn’t able to register in time for the earlier peyups iterations (and the one time I did register, life happened so I didn’t get to be an active member) and I’m grateful for the chance to be part of this one. I hope I have not overstepped any boundaries. I just feel strongly that we need more engagement from the users that we already have and new users if we are to sustain this community. I fear that without a regular influx of new users who will stick around, this forum will slowly die.

3 Likes

Enabled Activity Summary emails last night.

Yung invites, di ba sya dati naka-on?

1 Like

Yay! :smiley:

Yung enabled lang ata dati ay yung Invite for existing users. Yung option to invite non-members (via email addresses) hindi enabled dati.

Naka enable na ba invite? Di namin makita kung saan.

Nasa share button sa baba ng mga topics/threads

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It should open a modal with the invite option

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Right now kasi yung meron tayo ay to invite usernames lang

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May option to invite people to join the forum using their email addresses.

Kung enabled siya, magkakaroon din ng Invites page yung profile ng mga TL2 and above users.

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Not listening ka, sabi ko enabled naman siya :stuck_out_tongue:

2 Likes

Invitation emails still aren’t enabled as of this writing. Yung invite existing user to conversation pa lang ang meron.

Oh, ganun ba. Nakita ko kasi sa akin meron so kala ko naka enable na hehe. Wait lungs.

1 Like

Yey! Salamat po :grin: Baka masyadong mataas ang trust level requirements. Haha.

Send invite by email is available to Peyups Addicts and above.

1 Like