Dealbreaker: More topics may be posted, but you won't receive more email notif..

Started by TomasM, July 24, 2018, 11:14:03 AM

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TomasM

Hi guys,

currently I'm migrating one community to SMF. In previous forum there was ability to subscribe to all new topics, so there is already a speed bump for the users, as they have to subscribe to all boards individually. It looks that they did, but...

I realized that there is even bigger road bump and I think if we can resolve this one, that would benefit all SMF forums, as it would much improve the activity of users. I'm talking about "More topics may be posted, but you won't receive more email notifications until you return to the board and read some of them."

So users are used to get notifications and visit forum only when they see something interesting for them, that sounds very logical. But for some reason forum software decides, to not give you more updates, unless you show up. For busy people this is not good.

Is it possible to introduce an option to set this, or perhaps solve it other ways?

Thank you!

TomasM

I was analyzing my work flow and realized that there is even bigger problem with this approach. Let's say I get new topic notification titled "Soccer practice this Tuesday", if I'm not involved with soccer team, I will just delete that email without even opening it. So I will never see that dreaded warning "More topics may be posted, but you won't receive more email notifications".

That means several unimportant notifications prevent members from getting following notifications they really care about. This behavior should be set not by forum, but admin or even better by users.

Overall I would also suggest making it in bold for anyone to take notice.

In essence everything is about time management: I spent 5 sec. in my mailbox to decide if this piece of information has value for me, done, I don't want to go to forum to spend another 5 mins to look for something of value for me.

I hope I made the case ;)

Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen

There are options for notifications in everyone's profile, that can be used to control how they are being notified. Have you looked at those options?
Slava
Ukraini!


"Before you allow people access to your forum, especially in an administrative position, you must be aware that that person can seriously damage your forum. Therefore, you should only allow people that you trust, implicitly, to have such access." -Douglas

How you can help SMF

TomasM

Yes, but this is affected across the board, because forum makes this restriction.

This is excerpt of the Notification email:

QuoteA new topic, 'Football Camp', has been made on a board you are watching.

You can see it at

http://address.org/forum/index.php?topic=43.new#new

More topics may be posted, but you won't receive more email notifications until you return to the board and read some of them.

The text of the topic is shown below: ...

There is no option to set this behavior.

TomasM

These are my settings.

But the subscriptions are set on board view and I set to get notifications and emails. And that email part is governed by the forum.

@rjen

It seems you are looking for newsletters instead of notification .

My users would go nuts if they received a notification for each post added to a board.
Running SMF 2.1 with latest TinyPortal at www.fjr-club.nl

Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen

Quote from: TomasM on July 24, 2018, 12:10:50 PM
These are my settings.

But the subscriptions are set on board view and I set to get notifications and emails. And that email part is governed by the forum.
Ok, that seems to have changed a bit from the times of 2.0.
But would seem like it is intentional if that text is included in the notification.
Slava
Ukraini!


"Before you allow people access to your forum, especially in an administrative position, you must be aware that that person can seriously damage your forum. Therefore, you should only allow people that you trust, implicitly, to have such access." -Douglas

How you can help SMF

TomasM

Quote from: @rjen on July 24, 2018, 12:33:18 PM
It seems you are looking for newsletters instead of notification .

My users would go nuts if they received a notification for each post added to a board.

But your users <> my users. My users have perhaps 5 min. per day for these things and they make decisions in the mailbox. Forum should accommodate all types of users ;)

TomasM

Quote from: Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen on July 24, 2018, 12:35:51 PM
Ok, that seems to have changed a bit from the times of 2.0.
But would seem like it is intentional if that text is included in the notification.

I'm not sure what was the rationale, but it was clearly not accounting for all circumstances. I hope now we can fix it and make forum better.

I guess it is good to have that option to withhold new topic notifications, but that clearly should be changeable, as it is not good for other communities.

Kindred

In this case, it is completely intentional.

a user asks  for notifications for a board or a topic.
there are new posts in that board or topic.
They get a notification that there have been new post(s) made in the board or topic
They will not receive any further notifications in that board or topic until they have logged into the forum at least once.

This is correct.
AFAIK, this is how SMF has always handled it.


Think about it -- if I run a forum with 20,000 users, 20 boards and 1/2 million topics (and yes, I do)
if a message got sent out EVERY TIME there was a new post, your mail server would crumple into tinfoil.
Слaва
Украинi

Please do not PM, IM or Email me with support questions.  You will get better and faster responses in the support boards.  Thank you.

"Loki is not evil, although he is certainly not a force for good. Loki is... complicated."

TomasM

Quote from: Kindred on July 24, 2018, 01:26:12 PM
Think about it -- if I run a forum with 20,000 users, 20 boards and 1/2 million topics (and yes, I do)
if a message got sent out EVERY TIME there was a new post, your mail server would crumple into tinfoil.

My problem is not about notifying for every new post, but about every new Topic. Your user may subscribe only to few boards and he should be able to get notification for every new TOPIC because not every topic is important to every user, so users may disregard few notifications about not important topics and after that there would be dead silence from the forum, as nothing is going on, and there may be other important new topics for the user, some of them perhaps even time sensitive, but user will never know about them.

For this reason, it is good to make this forum behavior as setting to allow admin, or even users set it otherwise, so every new topic on the board (not every post) would be announced if admin or perhaps even user selected so.

And if you have super large forum, as admin you could disable this behavior, but other forums with different users could have this available. That would make SMF better and more flexible, not catering for a specific cohort of use cases.

Arantor

Fairly sure this is a bug. You have configured it correctly but I think the notification email misleads you.

Does it actually only notify on new topics? (Try using two accounts for testing purposes)

Note that using 2.1 on a production site is not recommended if you can't debug issues that arise as it is BETA software.

TomasM

It looks to me that currently SMF 2.1 works as it was intended (although it was not the best decision as we see now). This we see from the warning included with the message itself:

"More topics may be posted, but you won't receive more email notifications until you return to the board and read some of them."

New Topic notification notifies you only about 1 or 2 new topics, after that even if there are more new topics, I would not get notifications.

I know about the Beta dangers, but it let's me use some new features I need and in return I'm participating in the development with bug reports  O:)

Kindred

hmmm.....    I could be wrong, but I believe that it only notifies you of the FIRST new topic in a watched board - and then resets the notification when you visit, so the next one will notify you...    any additional topics between the notification and the visit will not send a notification


Yes. Confirmed on my 2.0 test site.

New user added
set up notification for the "Another Board"
logged out
log in as test user
make posts in "Another Board"
test 1
test 2
test 3

email only delivers a notification of the "test 1" post


this is the expected behavior as I have always understood it.

I understand what the OP is asking for and why... but I can still see that absolutely killing the email queue of a large site.
I'm not even saying that he is wrong... I would argue that his use case is actually the edge case in this instance, however.
(same as not allowing someone to "watch/subscribe" to EVERYTHING with a single click.)

(and, Tomas, there is no function for the admin to disable the users' ability to add notifications/watched topics/boards.

Слaва
Украинi

Please do not PM, IM or Email me with support questions.  You will get better and faster responses in the support boards.  Thank you.

"Loki is not evil, although he is certainly not a force for good. Loki is... complicated."

Bigguy

Well, this makes a lot of sense.(I'm being serious actually) I thought the system was broken but it's not. I understand why it is like this as well. I never knew that. Thanks Kindred.

Kindred

Confirmed.... the same thing happens on 2.1

Settings:
How frequently to tell me: Straight away
When a board I follow gets a topic, I normally want to know via...  email



Still only notified me of the FIRST new topic - and won't notify me of any more until I visit the forum.
Слaва
Украинi

Please do not PM, IM or Email me with support questions.  You will get better and faster responses in the support boards.  Thank you.

"Loki is not evil, although he is certainly not a force for good. Loki is... complicated."

TomasM

Interesting, are there stats about the SMF installations, eg. what is the breakdown between large/medium/small communities. Because then it may not be an edge case after all.

I don't know if it would be difficult to add this option, but perhaps there could be an easy code hack to remove that 1 notification limit that could be applied to specific SMF file?

Or perhaps there could be an option about how many Notifications to send until stop, with the option 0 to let it work without restrictions?

Arantor

Then it's a bug because in the 'how frequently to tell me' dropdown there are two options.

The first relevant option says 'Straight away', the second says 'Straight away (but only for the first unread message)'.

Since you're describing the behaviour of the latter but the screenshot clearly shows the former, something is broken.

TomasM

Brilliant! Thank you!  ;D ;D ;D

Edit: Although this setting ('Straight away (but only for the first unread message)'.) may be related to a post reply notifications, not the board - new topics.

Illori


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