Send notifications to everyone in group

[Kristina Hoeppner]

Originally reported as part of bug #1201907. Discussion at https://mahara.org/interaction/forum/topic.php?id=5568

As an administrator, I’d like to be able to contact everyone in the group via email.

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I'd expand this to include tutors as well as they can have some administrator rights.

Normally, we only say "notification" because it is up to the user on how they want to receive them: via mail or just in their Mahara inbox. Would that be OK?

[Marylena Sevigney (mcsevigney)]

That would be okay to have the user define that, except that I also find the Mahara inbox tough to access. The only way I can find is from the "Recent Activity" block. Is there another way to access the inbox?

Best,
Marylena

[Aaron Wells (u-aaronw)]

Hi Marylena,

Yes, there should be an inbox icon in the upper-right, next to the "Settings" and "Logout" button. It's mentioned on this page, but there's not a picture of it: http://manual.mahara.org/en/1.7/account/inbox.html

Cheers,
Aaron

[Aaron Wells (u-aaronw)]

You can actually send a notification to every person in a group already, using forums:

1. Create a forum
2. Set it so that all group members are auto-subscribed to the forum
3. Set it so that only admins can post to the forum

Then every time you post to the forum, a "new forum post" notification, containing the text of the forum post, will go out to all the users (and by default, that notification will trigger an email to all of them).

So given that, is there still a use case for sending a "private message" to every member of the group simultaneously?

[Kristina Hoeppner (kris-hoeppner)]

A screenshot which includes the "Inbox" is on the Dashboard screenshot at http://manual.mahara.org/en/1.7/intro/dashboard.html#overview (item #4).

[Aaron Wells (u-aaronw)]

I was going to mark this as "Incomplete" for now, because as mentioned in this comment https://bugs.launchpad.net/mahara/+bug/1202706/comments/3 I'm not sure whether there's a use-case for this.

Of course, I suppose it is a little obscure, that you currently have to create a forum and post to it, in order to notify everyone. Maybe this would make sense as a new type of Interaction plugin...

Okay, back to "Wishlist" status then. :)

[Kristina Hoeppner (kris-hoeppner)]

I still think there is a use case for it because

a) users can unsubscribe from any forum
b) the work flow is easier / more natural to send a message than to go via forum
c) if users have set their Mahara notifications or email filters to filter out forums differently than emails, they may not see the messages.

[Kristina Hoeppner (kris-hoeppner)]

discussion about mailing users in bulk: https://mahara.org/interaction/forum/topic.php?id=5779