After 3.4 users respond more to discussions by email

[ajnyga]

Hi Community!

I am hosting an OJS site with multiple journals.

After upgrading to OJS 3.4 I have received several support tickets from my editors saying that users have started to respond to discussion notification emails directly by email instead of logging in to the system and responding to the discussion itself.

I do not think that the email itself is sent differently in OJS 3.4 as it was before, but the email now contains the discussion message itself, meaning that the user can react right away without accessing the system.

This is probably something that has been requested as a feature, but it looks like it has unexpected results.

Questions to journals using OJS

Does someone else using OJS have similar experiences?

What do you think we should/could do about the issue?

[asmecher]

Hi @ajnyga,

This thread predicted the problem:

[OJS-3.1.2] possible to include content of discussion messages in notification emails?

Hi, Our journal is currently running OJS-3.1.2, and we’re getting questions from people who have been added as participants to the editorial workflow for a submission. They’re receiving notification email messages, such as (I’ve replaced salient parts with ‘x’): You have been added to a discussion titled “Possible reviewers” regarding the submission “article xxx”. Link: https://xxx/index.php/journal/workflow/access/199 or: There is new activity in the discussion titled “Comments for the …

Nonetheless, we did get a lot of requests for discussion comments to be included in the email, and incorporated that change.

To respond to it (and related needs), we’re hoping to allow OJS/OMP/OPS to receive emails. For this scenario, the notification containing the discussion contents would have a reply-to set to an inbox that OJS has access to (via IMAP); OJS would periodically check that mailbox for messages, and process them for inclusion in the workflow (e.g. capturing responses in the relevant discussion). See:

https://github.com/pkp/pkp-lib/issues/4142

This would require some setup on the admin’s part, but wouldn’t require anything exotic server-side – just an IMAP-based email box. This is pretty easy to set up in a commodity CPanel webhost.

Thanks,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

[ajnyga]

Thanks!

Processing emails could be a long-term solution, but it is not known when it would be available. Not in 3.6 at least. It will also be a solution that is not available for all.

Therefore I think we should also consider how to change these kinds of messages so that we encourage the users to respond in the system.

How about adding just the beginning of the message to the email and the a link “Read the rest of the message and respond”?

[asmecher]

Hi @ajnyga,

The quickest way to change the behaviour is to alter the submission.query.activity and submission.query.new locale keys (either using the Custom Locale plugin or editing the lib/pkp/locale/en/submission.po file directly, depending on how you manage things). These two keys are used in lib/pkp/classes/notification/managerDelegate/QueryNotificationManager.php, which is where you’ll see the message assembled, and might be a place to abridge the message if you like.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

[ajnyga]

Thanks, I might do a plugin out of this, I will check how that would work.

Ok, I see the contents are already shortened so that is not the solution. We had yet another journal contacting us about this today, so we definitely need to do something.

[alexandraFO]

We do not use OJS 3.4, but we do use OMP 3.4, and there we have experienced the same issue after upgrading to 3.4.

I agree that we would prefer people logging in and replying in the discussion thread instead of replying to the e-mail. We do a lot of extra work by then saving the e-mail and uploading it in the discussion thread to keep all information about a submission together. And sometimes, if I write a discussion post, I end by writing that even though they can reply by e-mail, I would prefer if they log in to the platform and reply there in the discussion thread, but only a few people have understood this (or maybe they just choose to not follow my suggestion).

At the moment, it is feasible, but not preferrable to do it like this for our limited activity on our OMP server, but I dread the day we upgrade our OJS server with more than 200 journals, and I imagine we will get a lot of e-mails from editors like you have, @ajnyga , complaining about this issue.

So we would also very much prefer a different solution.

[ajnyga]

Yes, I have received this same complaint from about ten journals so far, pretty much every week a new one sends a similar support ticket when they realize the situation.

But I should have this fixed with a plugin by the end of this year, I can post the link to the repository here when it is ready.

[ajnyga]

Looking at the code it does not look like those translation keys are used for the email. They are used just for the notification.

Instead the message now contains the full length discussion message which is injected to the mailable here pkp-lib/controllers/grid/queries/QueriesGridHandler.php at stable-3_4_0 · pkp/pkp-lib · GitHub

Wondering what is the easiest way of handling this. Can I use a plugin to override an existing mailable?

[ajnyga]

There is this recent hook added to 3.5 for sending emails Add BeforeSend hook to Mailer by kennydude · Pull Request #11735 · pkp/pkp-lib · GitHub

However, at this poinst there is no data available to know what kind of email is being sent. Also I can not find a way of maybe overriding an existing mailable, only ways to adding new ones.

So it seems that this is something that can not be changed with a plugin in the current code base.

It would be good to have a hook in the mailables where you can interact with things like title, body etc. before they are turned into an actual email where you can not anymore tell what kind of a message is being sent.