RE:Reply to post - feature switched off

[Morrus]

I wish we could keep it *just* for Story Hours at the very least. There is usually such a lag between actual story posts that I scan the emails and often dont jump on the boards unless there is a flurry of posts or a big story update.

The Story Hours are the worst culprits. The server has to send out thousands of emails every time someone replies to PC's Story Hour, for example. And that's just one thread.

PC has noticed that if he, or someone else, replies to his SH, the boards slow to a crawl for a while - which corresponds to the emails being sent.

One solution, of course, is to bring back the old thread-length limit, closing threads when they reach a certain number of posts. In the case of Story Hours, though, that can be a tad disruptive.

 

[Piratecat]

I'm not sure it would help, either, as people would just subscribe to the new thread. That's a zero sum gain.

 

[thatdarncat]

I've actually been finding that just subscribing without notification works fine. The first thing I do when I visit the site is check my account for updated threads or forums I've subscribed to. It seems to work fine for me

Incidentally, we still get e-mail notifications daily for forum subscriptions.

 

[Lela]

Something I've heard requested in many a Sep thread (and other places) is a subscription option that only sends the e-mail when the thread author replies to the thread. That would really help in story hours.

 

[Dimwhit]

You might look for some mods that would allow stuff like that. I think a cool feature would be to limit the number of subscriptions a user can have. Like maybe they can only subscribe BY EMAIL to up to 5 threads. After that, no more notification. Stuff like that.

But I can only imagine the strain all the notification emails must take on the server. I wonder how many were being sent out each hour.

 

[Brother Shatterstone]

I'm not sure it would help, either, as people would just subscribe to the new thread. That's a zero sum gain.

Not if we ban you from story hour also...

On a serious note.

How the amount of posts picked up and such since then? Are we up or down and such?

 

[Seonaid]

I've changed my mind. It's easy, if not just as easy, to check my subscriptions instead of looking for an email notification. It would be nice to have the emails, and I agree that if they can be reinstated that would be wonderful (and I think it's completely unnecessary to include the text of the new message), but I withdraw my objections.

 

[ledded]

I agree, I am continuing to survive without email notification

You did make a good point, Morrus, that the Story Hours are some of the worst culprits, that I smacked my head and went 'Doh!' for not realizing sooner. How many non-SH threads out there have 1000 people subscribed to them? Even the more intense PbP's cant be generating as much traffic as a relatively popular SH can generate.

Anyway, I miss 'em, but also withdraw my whine about them being gone. Especially since the boards havent ground to a halt in a while (that I've noticed, at least).

 

[woodelf]

Seriously though, I don't see how e-mail notifications make surfing easier than logging in and checking your subscribed threads, you're on the internet in any case right? and you still have to open the page to see what's new, right?

Well, first of all, i frequently am interested in a thread that gets intermittent posts. These threads are often bumped off the front page by the popular ones. So i'd have to go to the subscriptions page, which is one more step. Moreover, the interface to the forums, like to all web-based BBSes, sucks. So the less time i have to spend dealing with it, the better. I can much more easily get at a thread from my email client. Now, what i *really* want is like the Lego boards (well, one of them, anyway): a BBS with both web and NNTP interface, so i can point my newsreader at an address and read the forums that way. But that's an almost-completely-separate topic.

Anyways, I do use the feature, but not on this board. On another board where it sometimes takes weeks or even month between the relevant (for me) threads to be posted to. There I can see the point, but here .. no .. still can't .. and won't if it means the boards being as slow as they have been before.

Well, i don't want to check, at all. I want to be told. If there's nothing to catch up on, and i don't have time to just go poke around, i don't want to even have to log on to the board to find this out.

I would be willing to bet you that those slowdowns and outages have taken their toll on members here. I know a few personally that have checked this board out and dismissed it because of it despite my best assurances that this board is one of the greatest around. During the outages period, I didn't even bother to check the boards, and have only returned to more frequent visits recently.

Maybe. The lack of email notification completely dropped me off the boards for a few weeks--i just assumed nobody was posting in the threads i was interested in any more, and i was too busy to bother seeing if something new had popped up. Now that i know it's off, we'll see how my behavior changes. I'll probably just spend that much more time on RPGNet and The Forge. Personally, if i have to choose between slow-with-notification, and not-slow-without-notification, i'll take the former--i usually have half-a-dozen threads in separate tabs anyway, so i just read another one while it's loading.

In short: outages drive me away, sure. But slowdowns generally don't. And lack of notification might mean it simply doesn't cross my mind as often to come here.

 

[woodelf]

That sounds like a good plan to me. Pick a time of the day when the server isn't too busy, have it go through and see what threads have been posted to, and send out notices to those subscribed to those threads. Might as well collect all the updates in one e-mail per subscriber while you're at it (instead of one e-mail saying "thread X has been updated" and another saying "thread Y has been updated", just one saying "These threads have been updated: thread X, and thread Y").

I don't know if that's technically doable, but it's a good idea anyway.

That's sort of already an option: "Daily email notification" instead of "Instand email notification". Though i don't know if that does one post or multiple. While we're at it, how about only sending the thread link? On most [vBulletin-powered] BBSes i'm on, the email sent is much more compact: "so-n-so has just posted a reply to the thread such-n-such" followed by a link. Surely that's gotta save a *little* overhead over sending the entire text of the post, too? Not to mention, i don't want to read the post in the email: i need to go to the forum, anyway, to see who else might have replied, and if i'm going to reply i need to go to the forum, so i'm going to go to the forum whether or not the text of the new post is in the email, so why not dump the text?