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Instant Notification Floods Followers


boschk

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If you have a highly active board with forum & topic followers that want instant email notifications, when offline, sending a unique email for every single reply to a topic can flood your user's inbox. The intent of notifications is to bring members back to your site to interact, but the way the IPB does it now, it can flood a user's inbox and make them t'd off instead.

How it should work is that when offline, the user gets ONE email for the first unread post in topics they are following. That will draw them back to the topic and when there, they'll see the rest of the replies. I have a user that got 40 emails on a single topic over the weekend. That's just flat out annoying. Now, I know that he can set it up for a daily digest, our default site setting, but the fact is, there is just a better way to do it.

Please seriously consider overhauling this function.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Yikes - is this seriously how this functions? I don't remember it happening this way in version 3.0? As far as I remember, members would only receive one notification until they visited the topic again. Can anyone confirm this is expected behaviour?

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IPS really need to have a think about this! Another one is when you have notifications enabled for "someone posted a comment on a status update I posted a comment on". If you post a comment on a status, and then 10 people reply, then you have 10 notifications! It's silly not to have a grouping feature, or to replace older notifications on the same thing with a new one..

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  • 3 weeks later...

IPS really need to have a think about this! Another one is when you have notifications enabled for "someone posted a comment on a status update I posted a comment on". If you post a comment on a status, and then 10 people reply, then you have 10 notifications! It's silly not to have a grouping feature, or to replace older notifications on the same thing with a new one..




You got my +1
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Instant notifications instantly sends a notification if there is a reply.

What you want is the 'offline' notification method. Using that method, a user only receives one notification (regardless of how many replies), and only when they are not on the site.

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Instant notifications instantly sends a notification if there is a reply.



I think that the instant notifications need some improvement though. For example, let's say you have instant notifications enabled for replies to status updates. If someone replies to the status, you get a notification... but when a second person replies to the status, the first notification should be automatically removed, and replaced with a new notification that says "2 people have replied to your status". That way it is still instant, and the members are not flooded with notifications. I think this is how Facebook does it.
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How it should work is that when offline, the user gets ONE email for the first unread post in topics they are following. That will draw them back to the topic and when there, they'll see the rest of the replies. I have a user that got 40 emails on a single topic over the weekend. That's just flat out annoying. Now, I know that he can set it up for a daily digest, our default site setting, but the fact is, there is just a better way to do it.



Please seriously consider overhauling this function.




I would disagree.

I use a vBulletin forum, which will only send me an update to a topic again if I visit the site - it is very annoying.

I subscribe to a topic, because I want to be told about all the updates - not only one which if I forget to visit the board for a short while serves no purpose to man nor beast.

IPS do provide and alternative for those who are probably in the minority and only want one update, but I am glad that they tell me about all replies.

I would actually say that sending one update to a topic is less likely to brig people back to a topic than all replies, as the first reply migt be a simple 'thanks', whereas the reply after that might be constructive or controversial and would prompt someone watching to return and join in the conversation.
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This won't affect many people, but I feel like pointing it out... my users are a young demographic, so they have a desire to receive as many notifications as possible... for some reason... so they tick instant on everything, and this is the result.


Snow

HOLY faeces over 15000 notifications. It's been a long time.
%7Boption%7D Today, 11:51 AM ·

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This won't affect many people, but I feel like pointing it out... my users are a young demographic, so they have a desire to receive as many notifications as possible... for some reason... so they tick instant on everything, and this is the result.




Snow



[color=#5A5A5A]HOLY faeces over 15000 notifications. It's been a long time.[/color]


[color=#A4A4A4][size=3][img]

[/img]

Today, 11:51 AM

[/size][/color][color=#5A5A5A]·[/color]


off topic, love your minimal theme, no padding and removed the forum icons. the top tabs are nice and minimalistic as well!
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Hello, I'm new and I subscribed to the forum just for this annoying problem.

I'm using an Italian IP.Board forum and I'm facing a problem with the instant email notifications (me and many other users).

I'd like to know if it's possible, somehow, to remove the user's name from the subject of the email notifications.
This to avoid hundreds of emails like this:

goofy replied to <topic title>
mickey replied to <topic title>
tom replied to <topic title>
dick replied to <topic title>
tim replied to <topic title>
paul replied to <topic title>

for the same thread, it's frustrating. With a fixed email subject, instead, the emails could be easily grouped.

In other forums systems, usually you get only one notification email that informs you that someone replied to the thread and nothing more until you don't access the thread.

Thanks in advance.

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  • 1 month later...

Hello.



I think Matt did something about this in 3.3.




Hey, do you have any 'notification' that Matt did do something about this? I agree with the original poster about the flood of notifications. If I am away for any period of time, my notifications skyrocket to over 100+.
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Hey, do you have any 'notification' that Matt did do something about this? I agree with the original poster about the flood of notifications. If I am away for any period of time, my notifications skyrocket to over 100+.


Well I remember seeing something in the client lounge that he was testing in regards to this, but...I guess it didn't happen.
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It's working for me now so something has been done.
Still a lot of emails but, at least, they have now the same subject so they can be grouped.

btw: I had to recreate the same account with the same username and email... some how my account has been deleted.

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  • 3 months later...

I've been looking at this issue as well, I ended up making a few modifications in the following template bits to hide the option:
User Control Panel -> notificationsForm
Global templates other -> likeSetDialogue (see the $freq foreach loop)

I also think these bits of code are related:
"Topic preferences" section around line 2178 in admin/applications/members/modules_admin/members/members.php
Switch at around line 92 in admin/applications/forums/modules_public/forums/tracker.php
I did not try altering this code though and can't recommend it!

I'm sure somebody is going to tell me this was a bad idea but this also seems to work for me as a forceful method of switching all instant ("immediate") notifications to "daily", "offline" or "weekly":
UPDATE `ibf_members` SET `auto_track`='daily' WHERE `auto_track`='immediate';
UPDATE `ibf_core_like` SET `like_notify_freq`='daily' WHERE `like_notify_freq`='immediate';

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  • 10 months later...

It would be nice if admins were allowed to select the available notification options, otherwise it's difficult to control the volume of emails generated by the community.

Also, I think the options provided are not particularly good. On one hand, the instant notifications send to many mails (it may be useful if we want to follow a topic from the email). On the other hand, the offline notifications makes me miss some updates, as it does not send me an email when I'm online.

What is the reason to not send emails when the user is online?

Anyway, I think an intermediate option, similar to offline, but that sends notifications even if the user is online, is needed. AFAIK, this option is present in other software such as vB, SMF, or phpBB (but more important, this option makes sense to me).

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