Direct responses to threads via email.
 

To the Admin and the management:

Is there a way to enable members to respond to forum posts, of threads that they are subscribed to, via email?

i.e. I select reply in my email interface, send a plain text response, and it shows up on the forum as reply to the thread topic (that I am replying to).

Thanks a bunch for looking into this.

Bill

I am curious to know what would be the advantage of doing it via email when you can reply via the mobile app. You just type a text reply using the app.

nicoff, you bring up a good point. That is a way.

However, users get the notification via email and may want to respond there instead of loading the app. The advantage is specifically achieved when using a desktop computer and one wants to respond right away to a thread topic.

As an aside to Mobile App solutions, Android and iOS have better email app integration with all available services (voice to text for example) than the AA app does with a mobile OS.

Thanks Bill! Isn't there a link inside the AA notification email that you click and leads you directly to the post/thread? I know that other sites include that in the notification email but not sure how AA does it. I would that a clickable link would go a long way toward what you want to do.

nicoff.. are astutely pointing to ways to respond to threads. However, it is not what I am asking.

No I'm sorry, I don't see this happening for multiple reasons. Biggest being code/a program would have to be written. To be honest, I'm not even sure if it could be written to work the way you would want it to.

Rich, that is disappointing to hear. I don't know about what Forum software you run here, but seeing that you mentioned that you had a had in some code for the YouTube embedding, I was hoping you had some insight.

What forum software do you use?

So looking at the bottom of the screen, looks like this forum runs on the popular vbulletin software. So hitting the google I found out that $400 and some server storage leasing can get anyone up an running should they choose to make a forum that is in another interest- other than audio.

But what I found may help AA, should you choose to employ the capabilities listed in the two links below, they are how to guides to getting your forum software to perform as I have described above.

vB Mail Reply - vBulletin.org Forum

Email Integration (New threads/replies by email) - vBulletin.org Forum

Hope that helps.

Neither of those programs are supported by the original code writers anymore. Which means they are dead. Also the code isn't up too par, putting it mildly, and we would have MASSIVE bugs/errors. One of the codes/software is from 2004! I can see from the code that it would be next to impossible for us to use this, due to the fact they "push" the data every 10 minutes! That would be a massive load on our servers/site.

Another issue is, anytime we add code/program/mod to our site we have to be sure the code is safe, with no backdoor access points or access to our members information. This is personally, my top priority and greatest concern.

By the way we run dedicated servers that backup on an almost constant basis with a 99% "uptime" guarantee. I can promise you that nobody can do, what we do here, for a few hundred bucks. Not only do I write code and work the server(s), but we have a team of experts(with different coding skill sets) also working. Our site is a pretty massive operation that I take very personally. I couldn't even tell you the amount of hours I put in everyday since this sites inception. I don't mind hearing ideas from users but we have to be careful with what we may think can be done, no big deal.

Rich- Thank you for you detailed response. Of course I am just one member asking about the feature, who know if anyone else cares. Anyways, it's not about me- it's about making it easier for all of us to share our thoughts and ideas here.

We all know about information assurance and data privacy- I trust that you are on it and that you are very dependable. Thank you for all your efforts.

Maybe it would be worth posting a thread about the operation you run, since we don't get to hear from you much but you do so much behind the scenes? It would be cool to see pics of the servers and how day to day operations are run. Ivan seems to make it look too easy :D

We're rooting for you!