Participate-by-email!

by Vishnu September 2, 2009

written by Vishnu September 2, 2009

In almost all ADDAs (ADDA = the private portal of an apartment complex), the Forum and the Admin Forum are the most frequently used applications.

In the beginning, every post made to the Forum sent an email to all users (except those who have opted out), informing them that they could log into ADDA to participate in the conversation. Some of our users, especially the blackberry wielding ones, wished to reply to the post right away, by email – a la yahoogroup.

ADDA was happy to satisfy their urge to participate, at the same time not hamper the ‘Forum’ experience – by releasing the feature “Participate-by-email” . This feature lets you swap emails – just like yahoogroup, and your emails get posted in the Forums as well! So, if your laptop is out of juice, stopping you from logging on to ADDA, but you want to inform everyone that the builder is sitting right next to you on a 3 hour flight (woohoo!)- you could thumb an email from your handheld to ‘forum AT apartmentadda DOT com’!! This posted a message in your ADDA’s Forum, as well as notified neighbours by email.

Since the release of “Participate-by-email”, many valuable suggestions have poured in, and our team has been pounding away at their keyboard to implement the selected ones.

Today, we are very happy to announce the release of a bunch of enhancements to the “Participate-by-email” feature.

Here are the top two:

Personalized email ids

Previously to participate in the forum using email, the user was sending email to ‘forumATapartmentaddaDOTcom’. ADDA internally mapped this email to the user’s specific ADDA and posted it. While this was elegant, it limited the user of multiple ADDA.
Now each ADDA has its unique email id. For example, the email id of Sharlow Apartments is sharlow-forum AT apartmentadda DOT com. For the adminforum it is sharlow-adminforum AT apartmentadda DOT com. We have contacted the Moderator of each ADDA to ensure they like their email id.

To the user of multiple ADDAs: Now you can participate in all your ADDAs with one user-id (your email-id). Just ensure you are writing to the email-id of the right ADDA!

Facelift to the email appearance

Now you can see the forum trail in email – just enough to give you the context, at the same time not overloading your inbox!
Also, Forum posts come color coded Blue’n’white in emails. Admin-Forum posts come in Grey’n’white. No more ‘oops’ moments with writing to the Forum with a message intended for the Admin-Forum.
Here are the screenshots.