phpBB • Free and Open Source Forum Software

Very interesting and functional extension. Thanks for your work developing it. It's interesting to me because I use phpBB to teach some classes. So I don't have a huge audience, but large enough that I would be interested in using the extension to automate some communication with my students.

Question...with the current version of the extension am I able to manage what sub-forums/topics are sent to a particular group? So in other words, I would put students into a particular group (class) when they register for the forum. I would then like to set a weekly digest to go to a specific group at a particular time and period e.g. every week. From what I can see it looks like this is currently controlled on the individual user level, but perhaps I overlooked a detail or two.

I would also need to be able, on the admin side, to control which users receive the digest, so that after the class is finished, they don't continue receiving the weekly digest.

Broadly, I suppose I'm looking for more control on the admin side. I don't exactly want students turning off the weekly digest.

I'd certainly be interested in furthering a discussion to perhaps continue developing your extension for broader use. I can see it as a powerful teaching tool to help keep students engaged. Thanks again.

Look at the edit subscribers function in the ACP. You can review how it looks by looking at the screenshots on the contribution details tab. The admin can control any aspect of a digest. You also have the option to require certain forums or exclude them. See Digests general settings in the ACP.

Thanks. It looks to me, unless I overlooked it, that I would have to control each user's digest settings individually. I'm probably in a little bit of a unique situation because I might get 50 students a term signing up for the forum. When I put them in a group after they register, it would be helpful in my particular situation, to have the group digest settings automatically assigned to the user. Not seeing that but I admit I haven't installed or tested it yet. I'm obviously trying to automate some admin work to hasten the process of getting students engaged with the forum and the course material as soon as possible after I approve their access to the course. And a configurable digest like you've developed would be just brilliant to make that happen.

There is also a mass subscribe/unsubscribe feature, but it hits everyone. If the forum is only for students in your class, this makes it easy to subscribe all of them using defaults, which you get to set. I'd advise looking through and studying the screenshots.

Will do. I'll investigate further.