In order to drive users to my SMF 2.0 sites, I long ago edited the code to remove the actual post text from announcement emails that were sent to users when topics were "Announced" This was done in order to drive users to the sites to read content rather than simply let them read an email with one post and move on. I have found that occasional announcements are a great way to bring many users back to an SMF site they haven't visited in a while and to generate useful replies to topics that might otherwise go unread.
Unfortunately when I upgraded to SMF 2.1, the edits I had done to serve this function were lost. Additionally, I did them so long ago I have no idea where to find them to do them again. I found one old post here that somewhat explained it for previous versions of SMF but not 2.1 which believe has change which files control the announcement functions.
I was hoping the SMF development team would consider adding a checkbox option similar to the the "Don't allow post text in notifications" feature that SMF already has in the 'Features and Options' setting area to perform the same function to remove the post text from Announcement notification emails. I believe it would be useful for a lot of users, save admins from editing the core files to do this and would minimize the number of email replies admins get from users who don't understand they need to login to reply to posts and not just reply to the announcement email.
In the meantime, I was going to ask for assistance as to what files need to be edited to remove the post text of announcements for now until the dev team considers this request. Any help on that would very much be appreciated.
Thank you for your time and consideration, and thank you for SMF. My users and I would be lost without it!
Mike Vail
After starting this thread, I created a post in the SMF 2.1 support topic area here for help in temporarily editing the Announcement email template(s). It was there that several staff and community members pointed me to where the email templates for SMF can be directly edited already using existing features the SMF 2.1 Administration center. Please follow the below link to that thread to see how it's done.
Thanks to those members for helping me and others on this!
Thread on how to edit the email templates in SMF 2.1:
https://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=582182