Telligent’s email templating is very powerful, but leaves a lot to be desired on the documentation front. It also appears to have an annoying bug, which of course we ran into headfirst. You see, we wanted to include the user’s avatar image in notification emails that our community sends out.

The Problem

Sadly, the token you’re supposed to use for this, $User.AvatarUrl, is worthless; it returns a URL that begins with a “~”. This might be useful if there were an email template function to handle “~”s in URLs (it refers to the root of the site) but there’s nothing to say there is, and nothing to document how you might process the result with a custom function. In .Net there are helper functions Telligent provide that fix this, but not in the email template language.

I left this post on the Telligent forums, in which I point out that using that token you end up with a URL that looks like:

~/blahblah.aspx

And that using the function $global.FullPath() on the token, you end up with:

http://geeknixta.com~/blahblah.aspx

Which of course DNS doesn’t know how to handle, and nor does the browser…