Combine daily digest emails from different forums into one?
 

Our message board is set up so there are 10 forums to help categorize the different topics we discuss. There is potential for more categories therefore more forums.

Users would like to receive a daily digest of all the message board activity. In order to do that they need to individually subscribe to each forum. Understood.

However, when you subscribe to 10 forums, that means potentially you receive 10 daily digest emails a day... one for each forum.

We would like to reduce this amount of email. So I am considering two options and open to others:

1. Reformat the message board, but how? We still want to keep our categories, but somehow have them under a single forum so there is one daily digest email, is that possible? Or,

2. Programmatically create a single daily digest email of all the forums. I am guessing this can be done in /forum/includes/functions_digest.php script, but I'm unsure how to proceed. The use of prepared statements for the MySQL queries requires some research and learning (not complaining, just that I don't want to screw things up!) and overall the coding is tricky for me to follow. Still, it seems the solution is in this script somehow.

Any advice? Or other solutions? Your attention is appreciated on this :)

I can see your point here, but only if your board is small. Most users will never read through 20 pages of an email, so most boards would be sending out this massive email that no one is going to read -- I understand your situation could be unique. :)

Looking at "functions_digets.php" the code that you need is all there except the parent constructs have to be rewritten. If you decide to take this on, then I can give you assistance in your code, when you go astray. Unfortunately, the amount of time required for testing this type of code makes this prohibitive to me for direct involvement. Email routines always seem to be time sinks during the testing phase. :)

Thanks for the response!

You are right, it is a small board, and the day may come where a forum-wide digest may be multiple pages and cumbersome to read. But at least the user will still hold the power to unsubscribe to individual forums or the email all together, so for now the concept suits our needs :)

I've been slowly trying to work with the MySQL queries in the functions_digest.php to get a better understanding, but still hitting some questions. And as I dig I learn a little bit more. I imagine I'll be back with some specifics that I can't answer myself.

If I can be of any assistance feel free to ask. :)