In the past, I had found that once you turned on email notify for one post, it kept it on for that thread when you posted again whether or not you checked the notify box each time. But maybe it was not supposed to work that way? And I had not found a way to turn it off. This thread seemed to have been behaving that way until this am.
Maybe I was only using the reply and not the quick reply? But this am I used the reply and thinking I didn't need to check the box, I left it alone and then stopped getting email notices.
Rodney is correct in his interpretation of how it used to work, which is similar to how many other forum's function. Hence my suggestion for a way to turn it off.
I just opened this thread (after receiving three notifications) and the check box is unchecked.
If the functionality of the checkbox has been changed to where you activate the checkbox to receive notification, and uncheck to stop receiving notifications, that's fine. It just needs to be spelled out because a lot of us are used to the former method.
In any case, it needs to be updated to send only one alert per thread until your next visit to the thread, at which point it resets itself again to send an alert after your last visit.
I don't use email notification that much but here is how I think it should work:
If you check the "Email notification" box in a post and there is a new post on the thread, you would get an email. Once you get that email, the notification would get turned off for you on that thread. (That is the part where it would be different)
If you would like to get more notifications for the same thread, you would have to post a reply and check the notification box again. This way, if you desire to turn the notification off, you would not have to look for the post where you had that option checked, edit it and uncheck it.. Does that make sense?
I get many complaints from members asking me to stop the email notification for a thread. They don't know how to turn it off. The above way would fix this issue, as the notification would be turned off after you get the first email...
personally, I think it should be more explicit still. I would like there to be a subscribe/unsubscribe button for each thread, regardless of whether you post or not. You should get one notification email the first time the thread is modified after your last visit. each visit would renew your notification as it does now.
I think some of the complaints about multiple messages are due to the fact that each time you return to the thread you reset notification, so all those notifications do fit the spec.
FM,
The approach you suggest would require for instance that we each post again as we look over this thread. so that we would still get an email notification. Thus in order for each of to stay up on what's happening in this thread alone, we all have to post a reply. There would have to be a whole lot more posts many of which might be less than interesting.
It would seem that allowing us to opt in and opt out of email notification in a thread would be a better way. I see a lot of followup posts in the camera and gear forum in particular that don't require an answer but I still want to track what is happening with the ease that the email notifications offer..
Thus I suggest as Brainiac has mentioned a button to opt in or opt out without having to post. But I would like to see it stay set once enabled until the user turns it off (or say 3 years has expired).
Thus I suggest as Brainiac has mentioned a button to opt in or opt out without having to post. But I would like to see it stay set once enabled until the user turns it off (or say 3 years has expired).
That is even better brainiac. A subscribe/unsubscribe button would sold this issue.
Brainiac explained it exactly the way it would be most useful - a subscribe/unsubscibe button for each thread irregardless of whether the viewer posts a message.
brainiac wrote:
I think some of the complaints about multiple messages are due to the fact that each time you return to the thread you reset notification, so all those notifications do fit the spec.
No, some threads I won't visit for a few hours, and I'll receive numerous alerts - over 20 in some instances.
Getting email alerts whenever anyone posts to a thread containing a message for which I enabled email notifications of responses to the message. It is easy to verify that some of them, at least, are not responses to my post.
Firstly may thanks for this wonderful forum. I have sure enjoyed being a member and learnt a lot here.
Just a comment - I am not sure but has the forum appearence changed recently with all the titles and names (links) underlined? I don't know if its my eyes but it just feels a bit more difficult to read.
I think that a few things are probably in order here. This all comes from my many years of experience as a system designer and software architect, so please take it in right spirit.
1. Testing has be performed on each change before it's rolled out. Numerous times now, easily findable problems have surfaced due to a lack of testing.
2. Design is important. Here it is important to have either experience or an outside source of knowledge on the subject of what's important and good to do, instead of just flying by the seat-of-the-pants opinion of one or even a few people. It is important to stick to conventions people are used to when designing for the web, for instance-- this is a well-recognized standard. There are many books on the subject out there that contain many well-recognized, standard rules.
3. Testing should not be performed on a live system. No matter what you may think, it is a very simple matter to set up a testing duplicate system. Here, I believe you are using MySQL, so you don't need an extra database license-- the cost is likely to be low or nonexistent to set this up. When you have a better testing and rollout strategy, you will thank me.
4. When in doubt on usability, test for usability too, not just other types of bugs. A horrible gaffe on usability is a "usability bug", and just as important as the other types. Surveys can be useful in determining user needs.
5. It's important not to intentionally change the way things already work without at least warning people.
6. It's good to combine the rollout of multiple well-tested features into a single batch.
7. You should have an easy way of rolling back changes, i.e. reverting to the version before the rollout, in case things go badly wrong.
From the same experienced vantage point, I can tell you off the bat that a few things would be useful:
* Being able to subscribe to a thread-- but calling it "subscribe" seems to indicate a certain tunnel vision to me, as if you think that users are only interested in email notifications. In fact, many people already "tag" threads to give them the simple functionality they need-- seeing them in a list.
* For subscribed to or watched threads, being able to select from multiple useful ways of being notified of new messages. Simply being able to view a list of them in a browser on this site would work better for most people than emails, I am guessing. Some of your users may rarely visit the site, only when they get an email notification that someone has responded to a post, but others will visit the site regularly; for these email notifications are superfluous in at least some cases.
* For email notifications, getting the full text of the post in the message. The subject line is a step in the right direction, but not enough.
The very first way to get a good handle on what features may be useful to implement, for such often-implemented software as a discussion board, is to survey the field for features. The same goes for design and implementation of those features. You have a wealth to draw on in this case. Good luck.
brainiac wrote:
Yes indeed, a wide image will extend the width of the table that holds messages, and consequently the text in that table will flow to that width too. I am not sure how the old code pulled off the trick of keeping text narrow, if it did. Probably it was a fixed width for the whole table. I will look into this.
