[Notifications] Formatting of Announcement Notifications

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?

73 Comments
Renee_Carney
Community Team
Community Team

This idea has moved to the next stage and will be open for voting among the Canvas Community, from Wed. March 2, 2016 - Wed. June 1, 2016.

Check out this doc for additional details about how the voting process works!

milesl
Community Contributor

Is formatting always stripped? I have inconsistent results.

Sometimes I get formatting:

http://i.imgur.com/JMSyX1V.png

sometimes not:

http://i.imgur.com/O4rkyzv.png

Unfortunately, the latter is the one I sent to 150 students just now.

Would love to see this happen around this. Maybe an ability to preview announcements?

milesl
Community Contributor

Hi  @kmeeusen ​, I'm not sure I follow:

Both of those posts were created using the rich text editor. They contain line breaks created by hitting return. In the former case, those line breaks were kept in the announcement, in the latter they were stripped out.

kmeeusen
Community Champion

Miles:

Of course you don't follow, and that is because I misread what you were asking, and that's what I get for being in a hurry. Or rather, what you got because I am reading challenged. many apologies for the confusion.

KLM

djmoore3
Community Novice

I am also wondering about this stripping of formatting in email announcements. Is there no way to even add a line break in emails? Or would it be possible to preview announcements before sending? This seems like very rudimentary functionality that Canvas should have...

jthoms
Community Novice

So many of our faculty have complained about this problem that we have used JavaScript to include the following warning at the bottom of the Announcement creation page:

Note: Attachments, and formatting such as embedded videos/images/tables do not always appear in e-mail notifications of announcements. Use the Insert Content menu on the right to add links to course materials/files.

JACOBSEN_C
Community Contributor

This is an issue at our school too.  Maybe the link can be larger and one of the first things seen in the email.  The notification email including full HTML of the announcement would be great.

keyaiko
Community Novice

Those of you voting for this feature might also want to look at a similar feature request that is up for voting as well

milesl
Community Contributor

Announcements are still having their formatting stripped. The preview does not resemble the message students receive.

Here's a message that went out to 250 students, all crammed into a single ball of text:

screenshot

GGummess
Community Participant

This issue jumped up and bit me in the posterior, now that I'm taking a class as a doctoral student, and the only notification I got from the professor that he made an announcement was " the only notification I got in Canvas was "USF Canvas <notifications@instructure.com>"" in my email.  It would absolutely benefit me to see the word "Announcement" in the subject field at least. 

Glen