Champ › Guides › Email & notifications

Email & notifications

In short: Champ can email your forum members when there is something new for them. To turn this on, you connect an email account that you own. This guide shows you how, step by step.

What Champ emails, and when#

Champ can send three kinds of email:

• Topic updates. A member follows a topic or a forum. When there are new replies or new topics, Champ emails them.
• Mentions. A member types @someone in a post. Champ emails that person.
• Moderation alerts. A post is waiting for approval. Champ emails your moderators.

Topic updates are grouped. Champ collects them and sends one email every few hours. So a topic with twenty new replies in one afternoon means one email, not twenty.

All of these emails are off until you connect an email account.

Why you connect your own email account#

Champ sends these emails from your email account, not from Champ's. There are two reasons.

1. Cost. Sending email for every Champ forum costs a lot. We would have to charge everyone more.
2. Your emails reach the inbox. A few members will always mark forum emails as spam. If every store sent from one shared Champ address, one store's spam reports would hurt every other store. With your own account, only your forum's behaviour counts.

What you need before you start#

You need an email account that lets apps send mail through it. Pick one:

• A new Gmail or Google Workspace account. Free and quick. Make a new account just for the forum. Do not use your personal email. The steps are below.
• An email sending service, such as Mailgun, Postmark or Amazon SES. Setup takes longer, because you must prove you own your domain. But more of your emails reach the inbox, and you can see what was delivered. Choose this if your forum is busy.

Your email provider gives you these five details. Champ calls them the "SMTP" settings. SMTP is simply the name for your provider's email sending settings.

Use port 587 when your provider offers it. Champ connects on that port with encryption (it switches the connection to a secure one before logging in).

Gmail and Google Workspace setup#

Google does not let apps log in with your normal Gmail password. You must make a special password for Champ, called an App Password.

Step 1: turn on 2-Step Verification. Google only offers App Passwords when this is on.

1. Sign in to the Gmail account you will use for the forum.
2. Go to your Google Account settings, then Security.
3. Turn on 2-Step Verification. Follow Google's steps.

Step 2: make an App Password.

1. In your Google Account, search for App passwords.
2. Give it a name you will recognise, such as "Champ forum".
3. Google shows a password of 16 letters. Copy it.

Google changes these screens from time to time. If they look different, Google's own help page has the current steps. On Google Workspace, if you cannot find App passwords, your Workspace admin may have turned them off.

Step 3: fill in Champ. Use these values:

Turn on email notifications in Champ#

1. In the Champ dashboard, open Settings.
2. Scroll down to Email notifications.
3. Tick Enable email notifications. The email fields appear.
4. Fill in the five fields: SMTP from email, SMTP username, SMTP password, SMTP address and SMTP port.
5. Click Save.
6. A message asks you to accept responsibility for the emails you send. Read it, then confirm.
7. You see "Notification settings saved".

Send yourself a test email#

1. In the same Email notifications section, click Send test email.
2. You see "Test email sent to" and an address. This is your Shopify store's main email address.
3. Check that inbox, and your spam folder, for an email titled "[TEST] This is a test email from Champ".

If you change any field, the link changes to Send test email (save your settings first). Click Save again, then send the test.

If you see "Something went wrong. Please check your settings.":

• Check the password. For Gmail, it must be the App Password, with no spaces.
• Check every field for extra spaces at the start or end.
• Check the port. Try 587.
• Some email sending services refuse to send until you have verified your domain with them.

Change what the email says#

Each email type has a template you can edit. You find them in the same Email notifications section. The templates use Liquid, the same template language as your Shopify theme.

The Topic notification template (HTML Liquid) can use two things:

• topics — the list of topics in this email
• unsubscribe_all_url — a link that turns off all emails for that member

A simple template:

<p>Here is what happened in the community since you last looked:</p>

<ul>
  {% for topic in topics %}
    <li><a href="{{ topic.url }}">{{ topic.title }}</a></li>
  {% endfor %}
</ul>

<p>To stop receiving these, <a href="{{ unsubscribe_all_url }}">unsubscribe</a>.</p>

Turn on mention emails#

When a member types @someone in a post, Champ can email that person.

1. In Email notifications, tick Enable mention notifications.
2. The Mention template (HTML Liquid) box appears. It can use mentions (the list of posts that mention the member) and the same unsubscribe_all_url.
3. Click Save.

Mention emails only go out when Enable email notifications is also on. Turn mentions on first — someone is talking to the member directly, so these emails matter most.

Email your moderators about posts to approve#

1. In Settings, scroll to Moderator notifications.
2. Tick Notify moderators of posts requiring approval.
3. Click Save.

Champ checks for waiting posts every 10 minutes, so an email can take a few minutes to arrive. This needs your email account to be set up first, as described above.

Unread posts alert (not an email)#

Unread posts alert is a different setting, also in Settings. It does not send email. It shows signed-in members, on the forum itself, that there are posts they have not read.

What members can turn off#

Members choose what they receive:

• In the forum, they can stop following a single topic or a whole forum.
• Every email has a link that turns off all forum emails for them.

Next#

• Points and leaderboard →
• Moderation →