[Plugin: cbnet Multi Author Comment Notification] Any thoughts on adding a comment DIGEST option?

This is a GREAT plugin for keeping a large collaborative group in sync about what’s going on, and for drawing them back to the blog to continue the conversation.

I built a blog recently to allow friends to support someone going through medical treatment. On this private blog, every visitor is an author.

I have two challenges I’m trying to tackle:

1. An author population >50 means it takes a long, long, time to post comments. On the P2 theme, this is especially painful because the auto-screen refresh gets stuck with the spinner going round and round forever when the Ajax call times out.

2. On days when there are a LOT of comments, I have authors wanting to turn the notifications off.

When I faced similar concerns with Subscribe2 and new posts, I switched to hourly digests and the posts once again were snappy because the actual mailing doesn’t try to happen when the user clicks the post button.

What would be VERY cool would be to “mash up” the functionality here so that cbnet Multi Author Comment Notification would offer a digest option and use the equivalent of subscribe2_cron to send them out either real-time (what you do now) or in digests.

Something like this:

Send Emails:

For each Post
Every 10 minutes
Once Hourly
Four times a day
Twice Daily
Once Daily
Every other day
Weekly

I know there would be some work involved in building up the digest version of comment notifications but that work is mostly done in subscribe2’s code.

I’m not yet a plugin developer but at the very least I would offer some systems analysis work to document the relevant code in subscribe2 and I’d be happy to donate a few beer’s worth of cash to the cause.

What do you think?

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/cbnet-multi-author-comment-notification/