I am really trying to find ways to get folks more involved. I need to PUSH posts onto people. If i can figure out how to get email notifications for Group postings to work, that is a start, but most folks do not join groups.. thus my simple thought: how to get the entire site to be as one basic group so that i can email everyone for every post? This will be great while the numbers are low..  but it will be a killer feature to get the ball rolling.

You can just import the registered users role into a group. If you also set this group as the "Auto-Group" then all new users would also be added.

i have thought of that Ben, thanks kindly, but while it might work, i thought it might make the site feel pushed into a group, but perhaps that is my flawed thinking. I will think on it and perhaps give it a whirl. I know it is just very hard to get folks to hit the site without a reason to hit it.. This will grow over time, i hope, but at the infancy stage, it is very tough going.

I am not really sure what effect you are trying to achieve here.

You could try using the Active Forums auto-subscribe feature to send messages to all users. That is what we utilize to send notifications about new module version releases and other important updates.

Ben, when you have time, can you explain here how to enable having a group send email notifications to its' members when somebody posts to the group? Setting Auto-Subcribe in AF is only a partial solution since most activity does not occur within the Discussion tab of a group (at least not in my groups yet)..

thanks, drew..

Group notifications are "Opt-In", meaning that a group member has to expand the subscriptions menu and select the items that they want to receive notifications for. As long as your site has no problems sending outgoing email, this should be the only step you need to take. Realize that you won't receive notifications for your own posts, so you will need to use two accounts to test.

So there is no admin ability to set defaults for this (opt-in)? I think the use-case that shows that initial users will NOT spend enough time to find this out should provide a reason to allow admins to set this more as the ability to opt-out. In the meantime, can you outline the tables/fields that are required to be set to allow me to emulate the opt-in of all members?

and thanks.. i never thought about that, i was simply expecting an email from my posting.. my bad.

You would need to create new records in the dbo.activesocial_Group_Subscriptions table. Alternatively you could explain to your user base that if they want to get emails they need to subscribe. Some users may prefer to have the option.

Drew,

If I'm not mistaken, you can also email all users of new posts to a general site forum by automatically subscribing all site members to that forum. This would stray away from forcing them into a group per se. The option should be under forum settings in the cp. Correct me if I'm wrong Ben, just working from memory at the moment.

You can also tie in your general site forums to your community journal.

For instance, I have general discussion forums setup based on subject and they feed into the community journal for all to see, I could then also auto-subscribe my users based on role to those same forums to be instantly notified of new posts.

hey Jeff thanks! good thoughts. Unfortunately, it strays away from the general feel of the social website. I love forums but i am fighting the fb goliath and most want the fb experience, not forums per se. I am trying to evolve that by posting to my forums and posting links, but it is like pulling teeth. Social feeds seems to be where it is at unfortunately and we have quite a few options with AS but just can't do what i am hoping to do unless i group-it.

@Ben.. herein lies my predicament. The last few months have proven to me that while my users WANT to use my site and my effort, fb is just too easy for them and they keep flirting with my effort, then returning.. overwhelmingly: "it is just easier Drew" ...

hmm...

Good points for AF versus AS. I seem to remember a post somewhere that someone had created the journal into an rss feed. If this could somehow be leveraged and add for subscription to the feed from a journal, it could get you one step closer. I'll try to dig up that post. I can't remember who posted it. Could possibly be converted to an e-mail, but this one is over my head.

Found it!

Again, only rss, but can be leveraged to push more info to site users:
http://www.activemodules.com/active...mmary-rss/

If you make any more headway on what you're attempting to do, please share. Agreed, that notifications for more things other than what is currently available would be nice to see.

I guess as a baseline, i would highly suggest a simply email notification every time a post that you participated in gets action. Just like fb. It makes little sense not to. As an admin, as the guy trying to make my site come alive, i don't have time to run around the site looking for posts.

@Jeff: i checked out the site link and just didn't see what perhaps i should have, sorry if i am missing the obvious. I am not a fan of RSS feeds and wouldn't use that medium as i way to get my site rolling, unless of course i am missing the point. At this stage of things, i am VERY hesitant to invest any time or money in AS-related efforts given the very tenuous nature of the immediate future for it and dnn.

To add to this line of thought, I'd love to see:

1) Ability for a user to subscribe to all their groups in one place. I know for AF it was discussed on having a centralized subscription management screen. Ideally they could have the option to default to subscribed for all groups they join.

2) Another item discussed a while back for AS was a journal summary notification - much like how LinkedIn sends an email with all recent activity once a week or every few days.

I suppose you could accomplish #1 with xMod to update the subscriber table and #2 with an RSS feed and newsletter module. But it would be nice to have it integrated into AS.

To add to Jeff's post on the RSS feed - one of the AS roadmap items in the task tracker I've been following is the RSS feed for the journal. I hope this is a feature that will be coming soon.

What might keep emails from group posts from being sent out. I have set checks beside every possible subscribe option and yet see new posts and new comments and get no emails, no spam, no notices of failure etc. I *do* get email notices from the site so the basics work.