SMS Notifications Improvements
Currently SMS Notifications come from different Phone Numbers, This can get very annoying as my team completes tasks throughout the day or post comments, I get a separate number texting me that information. In order to look through what was done I have to go to each different sender rather then just scrolling through one chain.
The information in those texts are not very helpful either. It would be fantastic if the text provided: Project, Task, Who, and what they posted or a link to what they posted. rather then just telling me they posted a comment.
Otherwise Keep up the great work!
We will add a link to open an item in Freedcamp to SMS messages in the next Freedcamp release. We do not plan to improve this part of the system that is now superseded by our mobile applications – their push notifications and notifications page that conveys what was changed and by whom much better.
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> Currently SMS Notifications come from different Phone Numbers
Since this is available on the free plan we use only mobile providers that have email to SMS gateway and it is mobile carrier phone numbers you receive SMS notifications from. For the best experience please install and use Freedcamp mobile applications that have push notifications and the ability to quickly open the app and see all new updates on a single screen with option to opem or mark as read.
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Jody commented
Unless I set this up incorrectly, when I get text notifications of calendar events, it doesn't include the date and time of the event. Without those data points, I'm not sure what the value is.
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@Neema - re: "I get a separate number texting me that information." this is your mobile carrier implementation. We only email a message to "email to SMS gateway" your carrier provides. How they translate it to actual SMS/Sender is their implementation of the process we can not control.
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Just adding here as a a reference - https://martinfitzpatrick.name/list-of-email-to-sms-gateways/
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"When you send a SMS message over 160 characters the message will be split. Large messages are segmented into 153 character segements and sent individually then rebuilt by the recipients device. For example, a 161 character message will be sent as two messages, one with 153 characters and the second with 8 characters.
If you include non-GSM characters like eastern characters in SMS messages, those messages have to be sent via UCS-2 encoding. Messages containing any UCS-2 characters are limited to 67 characters and will be concatenated into 67 character message segments, even if the messages contain less than 160 characters."
Source - https://www.twilio.com/docs/glossary/what-sms-character-limit
So we are very limited to what we can send here especially if you use non-GSM characters. Not much can fit into 67 characters.May be a solution will be to separate email to SMS gateways from email to MMS (no limit on size) gateways and send to SMS gateways:
New comment - short link
New task - short link
, where starting phrase can be in yor Freedcamp UI language - German, French etc.
While for MMS - we can send more information (still not all we send via email though) -
Neil Thomson commented
Just tried the text notifications to my phone.
Not useful in it's current form, which is essentially "you have a notification, reply with Read for more info" to which the reply is "<person x><did something>. The result is I still don't know what the <did something> is or the contents.
The following would be useful:
a single notifications with:
Who, did what, and a bit.ly style short link to go to the item.