Email Alerts

[tom_menegatos]

What happened to the email alerts? I set up alerts so that I could

get an email for every posting and response to the lighting equipment

and techniques forum. This was very useful and I began to rely on it

so that I didn't have to constantly come back to the site if I didn't

have time, but I was able to go over the postings to see if there was

something that needed moderation.

 

I had actually thought the forum was dieing because of the lack of

email alerts. Then I realized I"m only getting the question and not

the answers. Can this be fixed.

 

I had also posted a question in the black and whtie printing forum

and didn't get any responses. I came back to the forum to learn that

there were responses but I didn't get any alerts.

 

I know there are/were issues with the alerts and this might be in the

process of getting fixed but I wanted to let you know what problems

I'm having.

[mottershead]

I did change the way the alerts work. On the forum-level alerts, you only get the new questions, not the responses. The thread-level alerts still work the same way. So, if you are interested in the responses to a particular question, you now have to visit the site and register an alert on that question, whereupon you will be notified of responess.

 

The way I have it now, it is not possible to get an email for every posting in a forum from a single alert, as it was before, just by setting a forum-level alert. Some of the forums have hundreds of postings per day, and just a few careless forum-level alerts could generate a lot of email messages, when the alert included every post in the forum. To make things worse, if somebody has registered a forum level alert and changes their email address to something bogus, then those alerts will generate a lot of bounces.

 

Since I made the change, I must admit I've been a bit surprised by how few people have even noticed, judging from the response in the forums. But there have been a few who have complained, mostly people who are following various forums entirely by email. One person logged in for the first time to photo.net in over 15 months in order to post a query about what had happened to the alerts.

 

The old approach ended up generating a lot of mail, which it is not clear was actually useful in most cases. I guess I'm waiting to see a few more reactions before I decide what to do. I personally like it better the way it is now, but I'm not mainly an off-line reader of photo.net.

[tom_menegatos]

Currently only one forum moderator can receive alerts on all forum postings. That is the primary moderator. Any other moderators have to use the standard email alerts mechanism if they want to receive similar notifications.

 

Now with the way email alerts have been set up secondary moderators can't do this.

 

Unless I'm missundertanding the way the Notifications option works. If I turn on notifications, does that bind it to my account or to the primary moderators account? Somewhere along the lines I got the impression that if I turn it on it will send notifications to the primary moderator as everything on that page seems to be forum level not moderator level settings. If this is not the case let me know I just don't want to turn on message alerts only to find out their all going to Bob who has disabled his.

 

Getting email alerts on every message posted makes things a lot easier for me personally to keep track of what's going on in the forum I help moderate. I can understand not wanting this option available for everybody but I would think it would be a very useful tool for forum moderators.

[tom_menegatos]

Also, the other problem I encounterd is that I didn't receive email notifications on a thread I had posted in the darkroom printing forum until I selected "Notify me of New Responses" even though I made sure the email me responses radio box was selected appropriately to do just that when I posted my message.

[mmmee]

There's trouble all over River City. I have e mail alerts on comments for my photos. 140 alerts - 135 uploads. I like these e mail alerts as it saves me downloading the whole PNet page. I can read off line. I cannot seem to deactivate those alerts on my photos that have been deleted. I think that is where the extra alerts are coming from anyway. I cannot think how to fix it, but to me this ties in to the left over comments when we delete a photo. Our workspace gets cluttered up with useless comments on a dead photo. Why don't the comments disappear along with the ratings when a photo is deleted? Wouldn't it be a fairly simple matter to fix this and free up some bandwidth?