Notification of New Classes

Just curious if there’s a way to be automatically be notified of new classes.
I’d like to know when classes are offered so I can sign up.
Currently I have to go check Neon regularly.

Excellent question. We try to post in this category on Discourse when we add classes, so setting your notifications to watch this category should in theory help. It would be smart if Neon had the ability for people to opt into this sort of notification system. I’ll reach out to them and see if there’s a way to do that. I can imagine some programmatic ways we could do it with their API and a custom field in accounts, but hopefully they have something simpler builtin already :crossed_fingers:

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I could probably write a scraper to watch the class schedule and send out notifications? :slight_smile:

If you could write the piece that would send notifications, we could just use the Neon API directly querying based on when a class is created to get the data to send.

Yeah, we don’t need to scrape. The tricky part is managing subscriptions – I imagine nobody here wants an email every week saying there’s new orientation or workshop safety classes scheduled. We could store info in people’s neon account records and do something like, every monday for every new class, email every member who’s expressed interest in that class type.

or maybe just email people when a class is scheduled that’s never been scheduled before.

Yeah, that part is where I imagine a custom field in Neon coming into play (which we could also build an API query for to retrieve email addresses). We can allow individuals to control that field from their portal as well so it’s easy for them to turn it on or off. A weekly digest sort of thing seems like it would be ideal and I think you’re right @Jon , we’ll probably want to set it to ignore some specific classes like orientations, tours, and woodshop safety (i.e. the things pretty much everyone does right out the gate). Setting it to a class that’s never been scheduled before would be a bit trickier. The only part of this equation that is unknown to me is the sending an email from a script part, never done that before.

That’s a fully solved problem :slight_smile:

We can use an Asmbly login for Google SMTP so the emails correctly appear to be from us.

First, we should make sure we’re not re-implementing a function Neon already has. You can waitlist yourself for a full session; don’t suppose you can also waitlist yourself to be notified when more sessions are scheduled?

I knew it existed, just never done it :blush:

I already reached out to Neon asking about whether they have something like this built-in, so let’s see what they say.

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