Forums v Email Discussion lists, a suggestion

Another forum

http://www.sitescape.com/forum.html

but don't worry vbulletin, don't think many will convert. It is different and "slightly" more expensive.

Anyway.. why posting?

This is the feature i liked the look of:

Users can email to a designated address, whereupon Forum will post it in the appropriate forum as a new entry.

what do you think?

lots of people out there like using email discussion lists. Personally i hate em but i think it would be possible to turn vbulletin into the ability to have both.

How does it work?

Well people subscribe to a discussion list. This is in fact a forum of your forum.

Say forum name is book talk

When someone posts a thread or a post then everyone who email subscribes to the forum gets an email with the message. Can set it up to do an email for every post, an email once a day or an email say at 25 posts (like egroups).

People can also send posts by email. To do this they send email:

forumname@yourdomain.com

now if the subject is say "Re I like Grisham"
then this post will get added to the thread "I like Grisham"

see what i mean?

This way the forum acts as BOTH a web based forum and an email one. I would love that it would be brilliant. I can think of a few egroups lists that would then convert over to my forum brining in massive traffic and massive member base.

I think the hardest bit is going to be error checking the email addresses (only from subscribed users) and making it easy for a reply to a post so that the post gets put in the forum in the correct place.

I would love to hear suggestions on this. I might install the software i just found (has a free trial) to see how it works. What do you think? I really hope someone is interested in this enough to think about making it. I would love to but please complete ignorance

This would be a great idea as I could also convert a lot of users who refuse to leave email lists.

There will be those who won't be for this idea as people using email to respond and send messages are not visiting your server and hence not making you any money.

If the email had a nice little enticing text ad link in it to your sponsor that may sway a few.

Yes, i thought of that as well being a problem.

Suggestions

1) Text Ads
2) HTML Ads.
- you could make it so that you only sent it to html based email clients. This is going to cut more people off but it could be an option.
3) Set a limit on the amount of emails people receive?
4) Set a max size on a post, ie it is cut off after a certain amount with a link to it in the forum
5) Only alllow discussion type things in certain forums/categories not all of them.

In the end i think the email ads is not a bad idea. Looking around for advertising, it seems that email ads actually generate a higher CPM than web adds that people have an amazing ability to filter out. Text ads are so much easier to fit into contact they may work out better. (and of course less load on server, less bandwidth which all results in lower costs).

Rangersfan, as you are one of the people who could probably make the hack i am trying to pursuade you here !

This is one of the best ideas I've heard in a long time!

I would absolutely love it!!!

Hi Chris,

Great idea! I'll discuss it with John and see if we can integrate this feature into a future version.

All the best,

James

Same here.... I know that my forum's traffic would be greatly increase if we had an integrated email list, where people could use whichever format they prefered.

-Chris

** drooling over this idea **

I could actually get rid of using egroups if this comes to pass!

sounds nice... but for some reason doesn't appeal to me ?

oh well i started something popular here

James that would be really cool, thanks.

Perhaps we should thrash out what/how we would actually want it to work?

How would the board actually intercept emails? would it use a pop3 account and read them of that? would we need some extra server software do you think to actually intercept the email? i don't know how that bit would work.

Glad people see the potential of the idea, would be a "killer" feature certainly!