[Notifications] Formatting of Announcement Notifications

[ddilkes]

It would be great to see more information in the announcement email notifications. At the moment, the formatting and images are all stripped from the notifications. The email notification also does not include information on who posted the announcement- it would be great if they included the poster and even the profile pic by default.

Could we please maintain formatting and images in email announcement notification?

[cward]

We'll be shelving this idea at this point. As much as this makes sense, HTML support for email is really tricky to get right, and the team's pipeline is overflowing.

[RobDitto]

Chris, thanks for this unfortunate news. Can you tell us more about what you mean by the team whose pipeline is overflowing? Did Announcements, as a Product area, get reassigned to the Canvas Data team (I know you as the manager of that product)?

[cward]

 @RobDitto ​, I also oversee the communications and admin functionality of Canvas, which this falls under. That team's pipeline is full of goodies you'll see much more about in the next little while, and I want to keep them focused on delivering solutions to pressing issues related to large courses.

[RobDitto]

Thanks, Deactivated user​, I appreciate the clarification! My institution can definitely use anything that's in the works for large course support.

As you can see from this and the many other popular Announcements ideas, a lot of us are looking forward to when that feature can get some Product love.

[jdiehl]

In regards to formatting of the Announcements, I suggest we change the order of the Subject line.  Presently, the layout is: Title: Course Name.  I think it would be helpful if the order were reversed.  This would allow students to more easily identify the nature and content of the email in their Inbox display, and hopefully make it less likely to be overlooked.  It is also likely to help some email filters work more accurately, for those who use them to organize their mailbox.  

Also, given how subject lines are occasionally truncated depending on the user's view, magnification, etc. on whatever media they are using, it would be a lot more helpful if the course name, especially if limited to a few characters, were to appear prior to the announcement's title for easier identification.

[szfavori]

Just keeping line breaks in place would be an adequate solution.  E-mail notifications of announcements need not be fancy but they should at least be readable.

[bryan_lakatos]

I second the inclusion of basic line breaks. Can we get any update on this? We're approaching a year since the decision to "shelve" this issue was announced. 

Pretty please...

[bryan_lakatos]

Replying to my own comment here: in case it helps anyone else who finds this thread, what turned out to be our problem was copying / pasting content into the Canvas composer from another source. We tested both Gmail and a Google Doc as sources, and they both looked fine in the Canvas composer but got malformatted when the notification email was delivered. Pasting content in as "plain text" (or composing directly in the Canvas composer) alleviated the formatting issues in our notification emails.

Hope this helps someone!

[scottdennis]

Hey Bryan,

Washing hidden formatting out of content composed in a word processor or other composer either by pasting w/o formatting or by copying into a text editor and then copying from there are both good ideas with LMS rich content editors in general.  I'm glad you found this solution.

[thompsli]

I have proposed a simpler, interim solution here: https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/10870-include-alt-text-for-images-in-emailed-announcement-noti... since implementation of this Idea seems stalled.