I&#39ve now added a story digest feature to ROSTRA so that users can receive emails containing the headline and summary of most recent stories posted to any given ROSTRA.

The list of subscribers is not handled by ROSTRA itself – you simply provide the email address of a list service. This way, subscribers have independant control over whether they receive the messages without affecting their author status on the ROSTRA itself. We are using the OU&#39s list management service.

Mailings are triggered by numbers of stories rather than dates. A script runs daily and checks the number of approved and un-expired stories that have been submitted to each ROSTRA for which a trigger level has been set. Once that number has been reached, an email of the message headlines and their first paragraph summaries, plus direct links to the full stories, is sent.

Unsubscription information for each list must be available for all recipients and this is done via a static web page.