Hi all,
we’re very happy to share the news that as of now, you can choose to include a preview of new content on your community within your notification mails! 
This improvement was induced by an idea which was submitted on our community (by
Why has this been added?
We believe that richer notifications will have a bigger, positive impact on the user experience. Users can directly read valuable information within their mail inbox without having to go to the community (where they might even have to log in first to see the content). This makes users happy and can also result in more community activity (e.g. while reading the preview of a new topic that has been created).
As we investigated this idea after our latest ideation review, we have found that the development work we need to invest to give you this option is relatively small compared to the big positive impact such an improvement has.
What has been added exactly?
We have added a placeholder option to many notification emails.
Without this placeholder in a notification email, everything will stay as it is. This way you can decide for yourself if you want to include the content in a notification or not!
This variable has been added for the following notification emails:
- New topic
- New reply
- New answer
- New mention
Some details of how it works
- We have set up this placeholder to include the first 600 characters
- If a reply, new topic, etc. includes more than 600 characters, the system will stop after the last word and add “...” to it
How to add the content to your notification mails
You actually only need to add a small piece of text to your notification email:
{content}Retrieve the notification email which you would like to improve via the “Phrases”-page in your Control Envrionment and add the code in the location where you would like the content preview to be displayed.
Not an expert in HTML, or not sure how to locate the right notification? This tutorial can be used as a step-by-step guide for changing notifications.
Some more tips
Adjust / create information around subscriptions: You probably know that notifications on our platform work in a specific way - you only receive a single notification until you visit the topic again. You can imagine that users might not visit a topic when they already can read the content of a reply within the notification. Hence we recommend you to be very clear in your messaging - inform the users that they will not receive any new notifications unless they visit the topic.
We also advise you to improve your notifications in a way that the preview can be easily identified as such, e.g. by adding horizontal lines & making the content display in italic (see example below).
An example
Here an example of how a new notification email could look like:
Feedback? Questions?
Share it with us in the comments!
