Need more granularity for notification settings

[Dll]

We're getting complaints from users that although they want notifications for things like replies and mentions, they don't want or need them for reactions to posts. It would be useful to be able to give them that option. 

[shiobi]

Before 4.5, members were able to follow others and disable notifications for status updates. After updating, this setting stopped working or were removed.

I agree with @Dll, and I'm getting complaints everyday for this reason.

[Dll]

The net result of this is that people switch off their email notifications so as not to get the notifications they don't want. Bundling together replies, mentions and reactions is a real backward step, and is going to actually end up reducing people's engagement over time. I assume that's not what you had planned @Matt - please look into changing it and allowing people more control, other than stopping their notifications entirely.

Edited October 24, 2020 by Dll

[Dll]

Something has to give with these notifications. Members who want to receive reply notifications are getting literally hundreds of emails a day because a post they make gets a lot of reactions. 

Ultimately that's making them decide to switch off their email notifications entirely....

[AlexJ]

Similar boat - some members don't want to receive any notification and site keeps sending them daily digest and such. It would be nice to have one option i.e. for member A disable all email notifications. Problem solved. 

[Daniel F]

5 hours ago, AlexJ said:

A disable all email notifications. Problem solved. 

That's already possible via the link in the email footer.

[usmf]

Our users are also complaining about this, but telling people to disable all notifications is not really an acceptable answer. In most cases, members are wanting notifications for PMs and thread replies, but the notifications every time a Like Button is pushed are burying members. Is there really NO way to turn like button notifications off?

[bfarber]

Pressing the "like" button should not result in you being notified of new replies to a topic.

[Dll]

18 minutes ago, bfarber said:

Pressing the "like" button should not result in you being notified of new replies to a topic.

No, but it does send a notification of a reaction to a post, which is linked in to selecting you want to be notified of new replies to a topic and there's no method to separate them. 

Edited December 23, 2020 by Dll

[SeNioR-]

I have a question. Was the notification that someone got a warning also removed? I checked and no user gets notifications.

Edited December 24, 2020 by SeNioR-
spell

[bfarber]

 

and notifications of someone liking your content is linked to something besides "following" already (it's the "Mentions & My Content" section).

[Dll]

5 minutes ago, bfarber said:

 

and notifications of someone liking your content is linked to something besides "following" already (it's the "Mentions & My Content" section).

That's flawed though, as someone is very likely to want to be notified when someone mentions them or replies directly to them, they're highly unlikely to want to be notified every time someone likes or reacts to their content. Particularly on a busier forum where there are 100's of reactions to some posts. 

[Nigel Moore]

Oh wow - we've been getting complaints from users as well since we recently installed the latest version of IPB and just found this post.

There is a MASSIVE use case for users wanting to get email notifications for when they are @ mentioned or have one of their posts quoted (and this is how the majority of our ~3,000 users have operated up until now, very happily happily).

There is VERY LITTLE use case (if any) for users ever wanting to get email notifications when someone reacts to one of their posts (as this happens SO darned often in a forum). 

Bundling the 2 x options together into a single option is madness IMHO.

We really do need this to be rolled back to the way it was before as even our VIP members have been complaining that it's now ridiculous to keep up as they all LOVE being notified by email when they have been tagged in a post so they can go and help out

(but turning this option on is now making them get bucket loads of unnecessary emails for every time someone reacts to their posts. In my personal example, this has changed my email notifications from IPB from say 4-5 a day to now around 50 per day 😨)

We have logged a ticket with IPB.

However, has anyone worked out any creative workarounds?
@Dii @usmf@shiobi @AlexJ @bfarber @Daniel F

 

Edited January 13, 2021 by Nigel Moore

[SeNioR-]

A lot of forums don't use CRON for tasks, SMTP for sending mail, REDIS for cache, etc. I wonder if the change of notification settings was treated with reduced queries and faster software loading?

Edited January 13, 2021 by SeNioR-

[Dll]

1 minute ago, SeNioR- said:

A lot of forums don't use CRON for tasks, SMTP for sending mail, REDIS for cache, etc. I wonder if the change of notification settings was treated with reduced queries and faster software loading?

I doubt it, since sending 1000's of extra emails a day is probably a lot more expensive than a few extra columns in the database. 

[SeNioR-]

@bfarber i see, but these settings are for moderators only.  Only members with mod permissions receive a notification that another moderator gave a warning to the user.

Regular users are still not notified that they have been warned, as it was in 4.4.

I'm confuse.

[shiobi]

4 hours ago, Nigel Moore said:

However, has anyone worked out any creative workarounds?

No... I told my users to unfollow members and disable all notifications for followed content 😞

[usmf]

On 1/13/2021 at 1:59 AM, Nigel Moore said:

Oh wow - we've been getting complaints from users as well since we recently installed the latest version of IPB and just found this post.

There is a MASSIVE use case for users wanting to get email notifications for when they are @ mentioned or have one of their posts quoted (and this is how the majority of our ~3,000 users have operated up until now, very happily happily).

There is VERY LITTLE use case (if any) for users ever wanting to get email notifications when someone reacts to one of their posts (as this happens SO darned often in a forum). 

Bundling the 2 x options together into a single option is madness IMHO.

We really do need this to be rolled back to the way it was before as even our VIP members have been complaining that it's now ridiculous to keep up as they all LOVE being notified by email when they have been tagged in a post so they can go and help out

(but turning this option on is now making them get bucket loads of unnecessary emails for every time someone reacts to their posts. In my personal example, this has changed my email notifications from IPB from say 4-5 a day to now around 50 per day 😨)

We have logged a ticket with IPB.

However, has anyone worked out any creative workarounds?
@Dii @usmf@shiobi @AlexJ @bfarber @Daniel F

 

So far, I haven't found any work around for this yet . . . but I would love to have one. Our forum members are not thrilled with e-mail notifications for every Like Button push. We've got some Admin and Mods getting over 100 notifications a day because of this.

[SeNioR-]

29 minutes ago, usmf said:

We've got some Admin and Mods getting over 100 notifications a day because of this.

Me too 😕 

Edited January 14, 2021 by SeNioR-

[Joel R]

This is one of those situations where I think a lot more thought should go in to behavioral psychology and content scaling. 

When you're a new platform and getting started, getting an email of your first reaction is useful.  Getting an email of your second reaction is useful. Getting an email of your third reaction is kind of useful.  Getting an email of your hundredth reaction is not useful.  

The real purpose of email notifications is not to actually notify users of all activity.  Really. The real purpose of email notifications should be to engage users to re-visit the site.  That's it   That should be the one singular purpose behind the email notification. Modern social platforms like Facebook have figured this out.  IPS, on the other hand, wants to vomit every last content item, reaction, and comment at users. There's information overload of trivial posts and a total turn-off of interest. It's so bad that there's a backlash, where users want to turn off ALL email notifications.   

If you go to Facebook, they only show you 4-5 notifications, even though you may have hundreds of content items.  But they're the 4-5 most interesting, most likely to click on, most likely to convert to activity.  That's the real goal.  

This is even more pressing in the mobile world, where we have even less screen real estate.  If I'm checking my email on my phone, you only have four to five chances / notifications to convince me to visit the site.  

When I assess IPS and complain about it being legacy, this is the kind of stuff that I worry where we will continue to fall behind. 

Edited January 15, 2021 by Joel R

[AlexJ]

1. SMTP - amazon ses - makes it all slow. - Website performance killer. (Thanks to addon for API but again 20$ extra and now depended on it for maintenance) 

2. Email notification: If user doesn't want email notification they should be able to do one click - disable all email notifications. As of now, they need to visit each topic and 'unfollow' each topic manually. That's just ridiculous. No matter how you dice it. If their is better way, please, please tell me and I will share same with our website users. 

3. Notifications: I would like my users decide what they want to get notified on - perfect. No issues here. In old days their was an addon from IPS Staff (members now) to notify instantly without refreshing the site. I think Neowin used to use that too. 

 

Edited January 19, 2021 by AlexJ

[Nigel Moore]

We're getting multiple complaints from users now - they just want it to go back to how it was before. 

I.e. getting an email if they are tagged or quoted in a post and NOT getting an email for every "Like" button push.

For some of our members, this is the difference between 1-2 emails a day and 40-50 emails a day.

I've seen some crazy dev decisions in my 23 years in the tech industry and this one is definitely up the top of that list. I'm sure there must have been a reason for making the change, but from the outside I definitely can't see one.

IPB have replied to us saying that we might see a fix in a future release.

I suspect the only way to get that to the top of the list is for us all to continually (and politely) keep asking them about this one. 

So, if you're affected - please make sure to open a ticket with them so that they hear from enough users and then schedule a reminder to check-in with this ticket on a regular (but reasonable) cadence. 

Edited January 21, 2021 by Nigel Moore

[Maxxius]

Wow, guess I dodged one by not upgrading just yet. Definitely need to wait it out until this gets sorted.

[Rikki]

On 1/18/2021 at 10:34 PM, AlexJ said:

2. Email notification: If user doesn't want email notification they should be able to do one click - disable all email notifications. As of now, they need to visit each topic and 'unfollow' each topic manually. That's just ridiculous. No matter how you dice it. If their is better way, please, please tell me and I will share same with our website users. 

There's a link at the bottom of the notification settings page to disable all email notifications 🙂 

[AlexJ]

11 hours ago, Rikki said:

There's a link at the bottom of the notification settings page to disable all email notifications 🙂 

No - that doesn't work. IPS Support staff told me that once you do that, you need to unfollow each and every single topic that you have followed. That button is just for show and I actually clicked on that link like 5 times and it doesn't stop all emails.