ACP control over notification options

[Wolfie]

In another thread about automatically subscribing people to threads they reply to (as a default setting instead of a member setting it themselves), something came to mind.



It would be nice if the admin could control what notification options are available to the members and of those options, control which member groups may use them.

As it is now, you have a few options going from no notification to weekly emails. While that is nice, on some boards that could create problems. So as a suggestion, allow the admin to create/edit/remove notification options.

Currently we have:
No notification - no email sent.
Instant - email sent immediately
Delayed - email sent if no longer active
Daily - daily digest of all topics/etc
Weekly - once a week

For boards that are running on hosts that limit the number of emails per hour, the instant and even the delayed could be a killer. So therefore, would be nice to remove those.

Some sites might to add additional options, such as an hourly digest. This would be good for busy boards that don't want to drown their members in constant notifications, but want to make sure that members get notified of all watched content that has new activity since their last visit. Promotes return activity without going overboard, especially if the member happens to be active in multiple topics.

Options should include time delay, ignore online status and static -vs- dynamic scheduling.

Ignore status - mainly for immediate notifications if the person is online, but could also send out delayed notifications if the person is online but hasn't responded to a certain thread after a certain amount of time.
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Static would mean that when that member would get notified, then they get notified after that amount of time of their last active time, regardless of how many notifications there are (so long as there is at least one notification).

Early Dynamic would mean to wait that long after the first qualifying item to notify happens. So if they are watching a topic and someone posts in it 2 hours after that member is offline, then that post time is when the timer starts.

Late Dynamic would be the same except that it would look at the latest qualifying activity.
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So in theory, an option could be set up where someone could get notifications 1 hour after the latest activity (in case someone wants to go and see everything all at once instead of frequent notifications of different topics), or get notifications every 6 hours after the first activity so not too much builds up on them, etc.


The main request here is to be able to, at the very least, easily toggle the available options so that certain ones aren't available if it could potentially cause problems. But thought I'd toss in the other ideas in case more/different options were desired for different boards.


As for the member groups, if someone is a new member and hasn't even validated yet or has but has become banned or moved into a group for inactive members, then those groups could be flagged to disallow certain (or all) notification methods. This would cut down on email traffic and even bounced emails. If using the above idea for making new notification options, there could be one that a lot of people like to use and the admin wants to make it available to only certain groups.


Overall, this is an area that needs a little bit of attention to address a couple of issues (seemingly minor but still issues none the less). Again, mainly looking to be able to easily disable a couple of methods, but also think being able to add new methods is a good idea too.

When considered, this and the other suggestion would actually complement each other. Being able to automatically subscribe members to topics they make + limiting how often (or what) notifications are available, it would help lower problems with hosts that limit the number of emails per hour while also letting boards encourage return activity.

[Omines]

Enter thread necromancer.

I've noticed someone having the instant notification enabled on a topic on my board. While this feature might be great for small boards, the 150 emails this generated over a period of 12 hours to a single user (let alone the other users receiving notices) is not something I want to have. The potential to be blacklisted on spam lists is too great. I've manually changed this user to delayed, I want to be able to completely disable instant notification.