phpBB does not provide the ability to send regular emails to users with summarized postings on a forum. Instead, phpBB expects that users will visit the phpBB forum regularly if they want to keep up with what is going on at the site or use the phpBB 3 Atom feed feature.
phpBB Digests are emails sent to users periodically with summary of postings made on a phpBB forum for discrete time periods. Digests makes some phpBB forum users’ lives easier. They don’t have to explicitly visit the site to see what conversations are going on around there. They just read their digest and if there is some topic that seems of interest, they click on the topic link in their email program and start participating! They can unsubscribe at any time. By default, weekly digests are sent on Sundays. The users determines the hour they want to receive the digest. Whatever time they choose, they will always get the latest news so they can pick a time that suits their lifestyle.
Digests can be daily, weekly or monthly. Posts older than this will not be sent in a digest. In addition, if you want you can elect not to see posts since you last logged in, if you visited recently. You can even filter out your own posts.
If a user does not want summaries of every post, they can be selective. They can pick the forum or forums that interests them. By default they will get posts for all forums that they are allowed to access.
Digests can be sent as emails containing HTML or plain text. By default the user gets the entire post as text, but they can also select to see excerpts of each post or get a list of posts with links to each post.
Please note that each digest is unique, and may have different posts in it compared to another digest going out at the same hour. It may not be an appropriate digest solution for very large boards, very busy boards or for those who want to send bulk emails of all posts for a given time period, as it is designed for flexibility, not efficiency.
A reporting interface is available starting in version 3.3.13. It can be used to get insights into how much memory or time it is taking to generate digests for a particular date and hour. This can help in troubleshooting problems if large number of digests are being sent for a particular hour. Columns in the report can be clicked on to show data in ascending or descending order.
Support
Release notes and discussion are on the phpBB topic.
Screenshots
Language translations
Here are the known language translations for the digests extension. Starting with version 3.3.5, only British English is included in the extension. You can find additional language file links in the README for the extension, or use these links below:
- Czech (provided by Petr Hendl)
- French (provided by Bonnaphil)
- French (provided by Fred Rimbert)
- German (provided by Praggle)
- Spanish (provided by kamaleon)
If you have made a translation please email me a download link so I can reference it here.
Version downloads
You can also download these from the phpBB Digests GitHub by selecting the proper branch.
