Last Week's Most Popular Topics

[webgeek247]

Is there anything like this for vBulletin where they receive an email of latest topics to keep all the members coming back?

[glennrocksvb]

You could set up an RSS feed in the RSS Feed Manager in AdminCP to fetch a news feed every X hours and have them automatically posted to a particular channel on your forum. All users subscribed to that channel would receive notifications like they would for a regular post.

[webgeek247]

That seems very complex and tedious to get working and site owner would have to count on users subscribing to the forum in the first place.

Seems to work much easier with XenForo by default where it sends an email to all members and includes an unsubscription link at the bottom of the email, so if they are not interested they can simply unsubscribe.

I am starting to think about switching from vB5 to XenForo because vBulletin is too behind on such basic things like this which help remind members about your site and to engage with the content. vB are still yet to add those php hooks you mentioned that were needed for the mod I needed too. Basically, very limited with what I can do with vBulletin.

[glennrocksvb]

vB5 works on the "opt in" strategy rather than "opt out". Both have advantages and disadvantages. You may get more subscribers if you do an "opt out" but you might also get more annoyed users.

[webgeek247]

But if a member signs up to a forum then I do not see the problem with it being "opt in" by default. Could just put a note during registration with a checkbox with "Subscribe to weekly news from our forum" and have the checkbox checked by default. One email per week only about the latest/popular topics would not annoy me. It is a good way to remind members to check newer content. It is a forum after all.

Seems to me vBulletin think average users know how to "subscribe" to a forum or get such mails which is not right. It should be an option during registration, IMO. Otherwise, it is like advertising a product which they see, signup and buy the product, but then they forgot about the brand months later because they have no reminders about the brands other products, etc.

[glennrocksvb]

vB has daily/weekly digest scheduled task. You can use it or create a new scheduled task off it that sends email to users for new posts in a specific forum even without subscription.

[webgeek247]

Is this something you could come up with? I am not a coder (if I was I would be a millionaire with the ideas I have i.e move over to the owner of FB lol )

[rnedelkow]

Is this something you could come up with? I am not a coder (if I was I would be a millionaire with the ideas I have i.e move over to the owner of FB lol )

I second that This would be a nice way to keep members informed and improve member activity.

You could set up an RSS feed in the RSS Feed Manager in AdminCP to fetch a news feed every X hours and have them automatically posted to a particular channel on your forum. All users subscribed to that channel would receive notifications like they would for a regular post.

Even this method seems like it would work for me.

[glennrocksvb]

I'll take a look at what it would take to do a custom weekly digest scheduled task.

[glennrocksvb]

Even this method seems like it would work for me.

There is a manual for RSS Feed Manager.

https://www.vbulletin.com/docs/html/rssfeed_manager

Or if you google it, you would find tons of resources on it.

[webgeek247]

I will check this, but a plugin of some kind would be much easier to use. This should already be built into vBulletin, IMO.

[webgeek247]

How about a plugin where we can do this manually? Just select some of the best threads we want our old members to check out... members who may not have visited in a while!?

Can select the thread by nodeid or something like that.

[webgeek247]

PS I will also be testing XenForo more to see the difference.

[glennrocksvb]

Can select the thread by nodeid or something like that.

You can add a Search module and in the search JSON, add:

"specific": [1,2,3,4]

where the values 1-4 are the node ids you want to select.

For more information on all the available options in Search JSON, see article below:

https://www.vbulletin.com/forum/articles/vbulletin-5-connect-aa/vbulletin-5-tutorials-aa/4280580-using-the-search-json

[rnedelkow]

I'm trying to import blogs from a feed so I tried the following:

1. New Navigation link for Blogs - Title: Blogs, URL: /blogs
2. Add New RSS Feed - URL of Feed = http://www.netsuiteblogs.com/Rss.aspx?ContentID=4180246

When I preview the feed, it looks ok. How do I make it so that all the blogs are displayed on the Blogs link I created in step 1?

[rnedelkow]

Seems to work after while when I place the feed in the Articles channel. I'd really like to have the feed display blogs under the Blogs channel since they are blogs, and let members subscribe to the rss.

[glennrocksvb]

Create a blog channel and put the feed there. You don't have to change the blog navigation menu URL. Going to /blogs should display all the blog posts for any channel.

[rnedelkow]

Thanks Glenn. I set it up now and will wait for the blogs to start posting to the new channel. Just curious, we have a couple of blogs posted per day with large photos sometimes. Do you think this will substantially increase the database size or server performance in the long run?

[glennrocksvb]

Yes it will increase database size. You can move the attachment storage from database to file system.

[rnedelkow]

Thanks again.