Is it possible to give some sort of notification or send an email for unanswered questions or posts?

There are a couple ways to do this, each would require some custom code be written.

• A plugin that handles the Forum Thread Create event and schedules a job for 18 hours later that could check if any replies have been posted and send an email if not.
• A job plugin or automation that runs on a schedule and does logic to fetch forum threads and check for any that are over 18 hours old with no replies.

It would be more difficult to customize the content of the notification if done via automation, as plugins can specify ITemplatable and expose a rich text editor for adjusting the notification/email content.

On the second point, the automation, I'm looking at possibly building this out with our Prof Services team to give back to the community. Will have to see where we can fit it in.

Would this notification fire *every* 18 hours a thread remains unanswered, meaning the same thread could fire notification several times? Or would you expect only one notification per thread?

Who receives the notification (you mention a specific email so set a configuration option for  that or create a user with that email)? Should we also base it on a role that you select? Would the OP get something as well to let them know its been bumped?

Anything else we aren't asking?

cc 

On the second point, the automation, I'm looking at possibly building this out with our Prof Services team to give back to the community. Will have to see where we can fit it in.

Would this notification fire *every* 18 hours a thread remains unanswered, meaning the same thread could fire notification several times? Or would you expect only one notification per thread?

Who receives the notification (you mention a specific email so set a configuration option for  that or create a user with that email)? Should we also base it on a role that you select? Would the OP get something as well to let them know its been bumped?

Anything else we aren't asking?

cc 

My 2 cents since I would also like this functionality:

Grant Pankonien said:

Would this notification fire *every* 18 hours a thread remains unanswered, meaning the same thread could fire notification several times? Or would you expect only one notification per thread?

I'd expect one based on a configurable time (I'd personally expect 24 or 48, not 18 hours), but I could see different needs for different communities -- case deflection-focused communities may need shorter time limits. 

Grant Pankonien said:

Should we also base it on a role that you select?

I would see this being similar to the user/role dropdown in Reports, where you can include either specific users or specific roles. For example, if this was a product-specific group, you could choose a "Product A moderators" role, or, if there is only one Product Manager you want to call out, you can choose that specific user. I think being able to specify a specific email address would be helpful, e.g. "support@company.com". 

Alternately, it could just go to Owners / Managers of the group and it becomes a moderation responsibility. 

Grant Pankonien said:

Would the OP get something as well to let them know its been bumped?

I vote no, or make this optional. This would feel like when you're listening to hold music and the voice comes on to tell you "thank you for waiting." OP would get excited about a reply, just to hear that it's a reply saying they're still waiting. 

Grant Pankonien said:

Anything else we aren't asking?

I would see this as an automation that you could configure on a per-forum or per-group basis, so a community may have multiple versions of this firing, versus it being site-wide for all forums. As mentioned above, each group or forum may have different needs. 

Thanks for looking into this Grant Pankonien ! 

Thanks for investigating a solution for this Grant Pankonien

Regarding how often the notification would fire I feel it should be configurable as Alex mentions below.

Grant Pankonien said:

Would this notification fire *every* 18 hours a thread remains unanswered, meaning the same thread could fire notification several times? Or would you expect only one notification per thread?

I would think you run the thread once every specified timeframe and if a post is still unanswered you send another notification, not just one and done.

In other words, every time you run the thread to check for unanswered posts it will send a notification for any post that remains unanswered during the last period of time since it was run whether or not a previous notification was already sent regarding that post.

An enhanced possibility of the timing of running the thread might be to run more frequently based on the age of the post such that if a post is unanswered after maybe 48 hours you can configure the thread to run more often until it gets answered.  I guess another possibility would be to list the ages of any unanswered posts so you could tell which ones have been waiting the longest.

Grant Pankonien said:

Who receives the notification

I think it should be configurable as well, either by role or by email address(es) and would be different for each forum or group as Alex mentioned.

If a solution is built would it be made available for v12 and v11 (and maybe older versions)?  We are still on v11 and will be upgrading to the latest v11 release in the coming weeks so just wanting to check on platform availability.

Chris

Thank you both chrisseamons and Alex Nassi ! Good stuff to think about.

chrisseamons said:

If a solution is built would it be made available for v12 and v11 (and maybe older versions)?  We are still on v11 and will be upgrading to the latest v11 release in the coming weeks so just wanting to check on platform availability.

Since we're thinking this would be an automation, it would work for v11 and v12.