Every newsletter email is sent at a certain time, as can be seen in /admin/reports/dblog.

It would be very helpful to have a views field that displays the send time in question.

This would allow to see/calculate after how much time users on average react to the reception of the newsletter.

As an example: the view would still display all the opens, for example, but next to each open would also be the timestamp of when cron has actually sent the newsletter to this email.

This is important because some cron runs can take many hours, sometimes the better part of a day.

Comments

weseze’s picture

weseze commented

So we would need te keep track of the sent time (date+time) when each and every mail was sent?
I would also like to see this, but I have some performance concerns... will need to investigate.

rmcom’s picture

rmcom commented

How about displaying only the time from the log when the cron run was finished (or started, or both, to have a record of the send window)?

weseze’s picture

weseze commented

Problem is that that information is also not stored at the moment. Simplenews might store this, wil have to investigate that.

weseze’s picture

weseze commented
Version: 6.x-3.x-dev » 7.x-1.x-dev

Setting this to 7.x

jjchinquist’s picture

jjchinquist
Location Vienna, Austria
commented

The statistic is a nice to have but I have never had that request from Marketing or the writers of a site. I also constantly debate this with our Marketing department when it is too much information and statistics.

That being said, it would be pretty simple to add a drupal_write_record at the same time the module is adding the counter image to the newsletter before sending.
My reserve is scalability, performance and eventually the module being bloated. To have a record of when each subscriber actually was sent the newsletter would mean a new database table - e.g. simplenews_statistics - or modifying how the simplenews_statistics_opens" table is managed and it means 1 record per subscriber per newsletter. It will get fairly big fairly fast. The opens and clicks tables are already fairly large.

To solve performance at least, there could be an option for the administrator to choose to track this setting.

What are your reactions?

weseze’s picture

weseze commented

I think it is not useful to store the send date of every mail. The start-end window of sending might be useful to store. That also wouldn't be much of a performance issue

jjchinquist’s picture

jjchinquist
Location Vienna, Austria
commented

I agree with weseze, but am certainly open to hearing the arguments for the other side. @rmcom - if this is a small case that you need for one website, a small module dependent on simplenews_statistics would be a good solution too.

Regards, Jeremy

rmcom’s picture

rmcom commented

I also think that the "start-end window of sending" solution as proposed by weseze (#6) would be best. It is more meaningful than the current "node created on" time stamp.

jjchinquist’s picture

jjchinquist
Location Vienna, Austria
commented
Assigned: Unassigned » jjchinquist
Status: Active » Closed (duplicate)

There is already a patch for this behaviour and it is a duplicate issue: http://drupal.org/node/1660860. I am not certain, but I think Weseze already applied the patch to the dev version too.

Jeremy