Akeeba notifications for small teams

[sabv-sabv]

Hello, just came across Akeba and read much of its documentation. Is all of the below possible in it?

We are architects using small Joomla sites to communicate with Clients, builders and consultants. One site per project. Max 10 registered users per site. No guests, no spammers- all users know each-other. Different registered users have different access across the site tho’.

1. I need my users to receive notifications for all the article comments that they have permission to view, not just replies to their comments. It is essential that I know that everybody has seen each-other’s comments and was given the opportunity to respond. I therefore need site-wide notification enabled for all my users when they are registered and if they unsubscribe to comments on an article or category, I must be notified about it.

2. I need reliable and instant email notifications so that the users can quickly respond to a situation (I’d rather not have cronjobs unless all the comments uploaded within the specified time interval can be clearly contextualised in emails etc, which is very hard).

3. We often find ourselves online at the same time so it would be good to collaborate almost in real-time inside the commenting system. Some desktop notification, on-screen pop-up or live comment thread update would then also help.

4. Ideally, users can respond to a comment straight from their email client and the comment thread is updated accordingly on the website (btw, I saw and earlier comment by the extension author but could auto-responders and signatures not be filtered out I wonder? This feature in Old GoogleSites was much appreciated by my clients and, apart from some unnecessary signatures, we didn’t have a problem).

5. ideally, I would not like registered users to be able to modify other people’s emails, not even their own once posted and someone has already replied to it. So they cannot all be comment managers.

6. Comment permalinks are essential for cross referencing.

7. All comments across the website must be searchable.

8. Ideally, users can attach documents to their comments.

Is all of this possible with the beautiful Akeeba? We are replacing Old GoogleSites infrastructure which is being discontinued this September, so panicking a bit.

Thank you so much for reading and for any feedback, Sabin

[nikosdion]

Sorry, what you describe is a completely different solution than Akeeba Engage.

[nikosdion]

The devil is in the details :) When registering on a Joomla site you are NOT consenting to receiving updates for all comments on all articles. You are merely creating a user account and consent to your personal information being used to provide the login services. The same goes when you create a Google account or a Disqus account.

When you subscribe to a Google site or a Disqus site-wide comments digest you are explicitly requesting to be notified of all comments. They also perform what is called a double opt-in. Clicking something to be subscribed is not enough. You receive an email with a link you need to follow to provide positive consent to being emailed. If you would do that on your site then yes, it would be legal.

However, you described something that is not legal. You wanted everyone registering for a user account to receive the emails without having opted in at all, let alone having gone through double opt-in.

Dealing with the legal requirement is non-trivial but doable. What cannot be done, however, is improve the performance in the context of a mass distributed Joomla extension. When you have hundreds or thousands of users to be notified you can't do it realtime in the context of a Joomla site. Google and Disqus don't do it in the main thread that processes the comment either. They push the information for the notification to a message queue and have other servers go through the message queue and send the notification emails. I can't publish a mass-distributed extension for Joomla which requires you to set up a RabbitMQ server and a bespoke queue handler for emails. I can most definitely write a very fast multi-threaded queue handler in Dart but it's a hell of a lot of work and very few if any people besides me would be able to use it.

When you have to essentially reimplement the feature set of an established SaaS like Disqus you very quickly enter into the realm of bespoke development and maintenance which costs hundreds of thousands of dollars of upfront investment and dozens of thousands of dollars every year for maintenance. It's definitely something that can neither be shoehorned into the mass-distributed software model nor does it fit our target audience.

[sabv-sabv]

Hello Nicholas, You've done it again :), thank you for the further insights!

As you say the devil is in details and possibly interpretation so I am only replying because you left the door ajar :)

Legality.
Nobody wants to break the law and certainly as a business I would not contemplate that. But what if you gave me a licence to use the software on a single domain only for a particular purpose in the understanding that all registered users positively _subscribe to all new comments and replies to all new articles that they have permission to view? _

There are several ways of ensuring that this is the case with small number of users. For instance, I can register them manually with a generic password only if they agree to the terms, then the agreement is sealed when they change their password. One can be creative here.

Please note that this is what my users expect from the website in the first place, it is there to keep everybody in the loop but in a structured way (users have limited access across the site to only areas that concern them).

Engine
It certainly would not make any sense to develop a full-blown multi-server solution etc, so that is out. I suspect that in my case practically that wouldn't make noticeable difference anyway because of the very, very few users and relatively few comment exchanges. The notification engine would therefore remain the same as is.

Customisation
So, in my naivety, the customisation would then be as follows

• users would manually subscribe to site-wide notifications as in italic above and have the ability to unsubscribe at any time (to any of them individually as I suspect they can already do)
• admins are notified when someone unsubscribes (in case someone doe it by mistake I then at least have the chance to follow-up with them directly

Maintenance
In my naivety again, I would be happy to copy and paste these customisations myself if this is feasible, perhaps with your help only to ensure that any future upgrades do not override them?

Would that work? I cannot possibly expect substantial customisation work to be carried out for free, of course.

Thanks again for your time.
Sabin

[sabv-sabv]

Whatever the outcome of this, I would just like to add this. I do not know you but then I get a sense that actually I do so having read several of your posts. I am following this up with you because, I admire your professionalism, attention to detail, your drive to facilitate meaningful and intelligent conversations (as you put it somewhere), to make things better and play your role in society through this unpaid for extension etc. I am no programmer but I see all this a bit in myself too and I am often pissed off when others don't appreciate what we are trying to do. Thanks again and take care, Sabin

[nikosdion]

Instead of trying to shoehorn articles and comments into working as a project management system — because that's what you are really looking for — why are you not looking into project management systems? What you want can't really work. Even if we forget that I'd be legally liable if I implemented something that breaks the law and I know it, it still wouldn't work the way you want it to work.

[sabv-sabv]

Thank you. Tried many but much too complicated for my clients who don't have time for bells and whistles. Need lean, simple, wiki-like experience that even the most computer-illiterate individual could use.

Old GoogleSites worked like a charm for us for 10years now but clearly it was too good a product to be been kept by google. And it was free- not that this mattered that much. The new one has no granular access or commenting- the most important features of the old one.

Never mind, nice chatting with you. Take care.