Subscriptions for anonymous visitors

Sending email to whatever address someone happens to enter into a form field is a can of worms that I don't wish to open.

Maybe you want to write an add-on?

I would really love to have this feature as well.

Michelle

I do not see any difference between this kind of subscription and the standard user registration process

Exactly. I won't reimplement and support that, and I doubt that chx wants to do it either. It'll be fine in an add-on module, and if it turns out that some hook or api is missing, then we'll help.

So, who wants to do it?

There's a (non-Drupal) blog I read and occasionally comment on. He allows anonymous comments and has a little checkbox if you want to get notified if that blog post is updated. I have no reason to become a member of the site (I don't think he even has that option) because I don't write my own posts or anything. I just comment occasionally. It's very nice to get an email if he comments back because I'd never remember to go look on my own.

There has been more than one time that I've left a comment on a Drupal site and wished for such a feature. I know there's at least two comments that I left questions and can't for the life of me remember where they were now. I suppose I could bookmark them but my bookmarks are such a mess already. And then I'd have to remember to go look at them. Again, these are sites that I have no reason to become a member of. I simply want to know if my comment was replied to. (ie, the blog I commented on got more comments; no need to be more specific).

It seems the subscriptions module is a perfect fit for this as it already has the infrastructure for tracking what nodes a user is subscribed to. I haven't looked at the code so I don't know how hard it would be to add a field for email address to its table and use that if the UID is 0. From a not having looked at the code perspective, that seems like the easiest approach to me. Moreso than writing another module. But, of course, it's up to you.

Michelle

I'm not saying it wouldn't be a nice and highly desirable feature, but someone would have to implement and support it, and that's not me...

LiveJournal gets the UI for this right, but their execution is pretty horrible IMO.

I think this would best be implemented by using hook_comment and allowing immediate registration integrated with the comment form. So, an extra checkbox is added to the comment form saying "subscribe to followups." If that checkbox is present then on hook_comment 'validate' we need to validate that the email is present and that it is unique within the system. If it is not unique, encourage them to login. If they enter a name, it uses that for that their username. If not, it uses the email.

There is no need to enable or disable this feature. It determines whether or not it should run based upon anonymous users having the ability to subscribe to content. So, you have to have the subscription_content module installed and subscription_ui and allow anonymous the "subscribe to content" permission.

I purposefully did not use the normal subscription form here. I think it is too complex for users here even though it provides them with way more options.

If this is not accepted as a patch to subscriptions_ui.module, the modular nature of subscriptions module can allow this to live as a contrib.

There are some TODOs in there based on some decisions that need to be made. They are:

// TODO we probably shouldn't do any of these drupal_set_messages for new users or at least make it optional
// TODO decide whether or not we want to send these emails either
// TODO provide a way to unsubscribe
// TODO associate the comment to the user (it takes more than what I've done here)

I'm leaving it "code needs work" for those reasons.

and patch

Edit: patch removed since it was for the wrong feature

Am I blind or is there no patch? If I see some code I may need to steal it. :) I have a need for letting people register when posting on one of my sites that I only got part way into figuring out how to do. Thanks for jumping on this!

Michelle

@archetwist, my goal was to provide a way to provide the functionality of comment_notify.module but within Subscriptions. I don't really see the benefit of subscribing to edits of a node. It would be trivial to change my patch to do that, though.

Wow, archetwist, that's really rude. Greg has stepped up and offered a patch to get this going. I thought it was very nice of him and your sarcastic response sounds extremely ungrateful.

This is open source. If you don't find something that meets your needs, you can pay someone to do it, do it yourself, or ask nicely for someone to do it. Getting nasty with the people who try to help doesn't lead to anything good.

Michelle

@archetwist - I should have said that "I don't see the benefit for anonymous users to subscribe to the node" because I don't. I've removed my patch from this issue and created a new issue to achieve what I want. Sorry for wasting your time.

When I said that adding the feature was trivial I meant that adding your "subscribe to changes" feature to my patch would be trivial, which it is. So I'll make a deal - you discuss what you think the behavior should be for the "TODO" items that I've described and I'll implement your feature within the framework of my patch.

Note that my patch creates users on the fly behind the scenes - this is the only way to do it within the subscriptions module framework because subscriptions relies on the user account to provide the email address. If that is unacceptable to you then I think your request is a "won't fix" or at least "postponed".

I'm sorry for jumping on you. I admit that I didn't even realize we had strayed from the original request until Greg pointed it out. I thought the issue was simply allowing anonymous users to use subscription and it sounded as though you were having a fit because his patch to do that didn't include node edits. I see now that that was the whole point so can understand your frustration.

Merry Christmas to you as well.

Michelle

Reposting my comment here: "If I didn't want to register anonymous users, would it make sense to set the uid to DRUPAL_ANONYMOUS_RID and add an email_addr field to the approriate subscriptions tables?" Or does this not scale well / wouldn't work within the current constraints of the module?

Subscribing...

Thanks, I'll look into it. I am currently using views + feedburner to achieve this.

damn shame we can't a system like this up and running... :(

@Divisive Cottonwood - what an appropriate username!

In fact there are several ways to get subscriptions for anonymous visitors, though not within the subscriptions module itself. Harping on the point doesn't help anyone. Instead I suggest you look for alternative modules ( http://drupal.org/project/comment_notify (6.x version coming soon) http://drupal.org/project/nodeupdates etc.).

Its something that I have to have for a current client and am about to undertake the design and construction of a module to address anonymous subscriptions. Does anyone have a list of functional requirements that they would like to see implemented in this module? So far I see:

1) Anonymous users can "register" for content updates
2) Anonymous users enter their email address as the basis for the request
3) Module emails anonymous user with confirmation that they must reply to in order to activate their account
4) Anonymous users may unsubscribe

Additional functionality?

1) Captcha on registration?
2) Ability to subscribe to specific topics/taxonomy?
3) Ability to request daily or weekly emails?

@toddtomlinson: Have you seen #203307: provide subscriptions to comments for anonymous users (=> comment_notify module)?

If you're serious about taking on this task, then please start a new issue and assign it to yourself. It doesn't make sense to tag on to this old issue here.

Salvis, I don't see why this wouldn't make sense. This thread is about a feature requesrt and finally someone steps up to actually do it. Let's welcome him and support his effords - I don't mind if that happens here or in a new thread.

toddtomlinson, I agree with your list of must-have functionalities. However I think that the points on your 'additional' list are not related to the anonymous subscriptions, it's about the general functionality of the subscriptions module.

Two scenario's to deal with:
- What if an anonymous user, who has already subscribed to a notification, decides to register on the site? My thoughts: his anonymous subscriptions should be transferred to his newly created user acount.
- What if a registered user who is not logged, tries to subscribe to a notification? (Let's assume that he uses the same email address he used for registration.) My thoughts: He should see a message that this email address belongs to a registered user. A password form is provided on the same page to allow the user to login immediately and continue with the subscription process.

I think we should close this..

The original requester created a competing module, the only people to work on this feature within Subscriptions are now working on it elsewhere, the rest is a bunch of fluff and disagreement.

Please folks, if you're going to work on this do copy the ideas to a new thread instead of opening this old one.

Yes, I agree with greggles.

I certainly welcome everyone who wants to put in some serious effort, and I want him to have a fresh start. There are a few things that we'd have to talk about before it makes sense to start coding, and I won't do this at the bottom of an old and unproductive thread.

OK, I understand, +1 for opening a new issue for this.

I have prepared a step by step guide for allowing the anonymous user to subscribe for the node update.

Visit this link for a complete guide:
http://c.pachabhaiya.com/blog/2013/08/drupal-how-to-make-anonymous-user-...

• Possibility for the anonymous users to subscribe to particular node.
• Send email notifications automatically to the subscribed users when that particular node is updated.

Hi c.pachabhaiya,

I'm interested in setting this feature up for my blog site. I went to the link that you provided, but it threw a "page not found".

Did you move this step by step guide to another location? Please let me know.

Thanks in advance.