email notofications: two feature requests
 

Hello.

I've been using LQ for some time and I've noticed two things that (I think) could be improved in e-mail notifications.

1) I think, e-mail notification should not be sent to me/subscriber if the last reply in the thread is mine (i.e. subscriber's) at the moment when email is generated. This is because notification's purpose is to notify about new replies, and if last reply in the thread is mine, then I've already seen them.

2) I think e-mail notifications should not include full text of answers made by people on subscriber's ignore list. Currently if you don't want to read someone's replies, if you ignore them, you won't see them in forum, but you'll get full text in notification email. This is wrong, I think.

In the long run those two things are quite annoying.
So, what do you think?

I think that you haven't stated #1 clearly: I never get an e-mail about my own posts on a subscribed thread, only on a subscribed forum. & yes it is annoying, but I suspect too difficult to fix.

As to #2, LQ, unlike MepisLovers, does not send me the full text in an e-mail, are you sure you're getting the entire post?

LQ apparently sends the 1st 151 characters of the 1st line of the reply. At least that is the pattern in the 5 notifications I got this morning. (150/151, 91, 149, 151, 151)

No, I don't want to see the entire text of a reply from someone I've chosen to ignore, but I'm not. So do I want to know that one of them, i.e. my ignore list, has replied at all? I'm not sure, I need to think about that.

I get the impression that Jeremy thinks the Ignore List should be used much more sparingly than I do, it will be interesting to see his take on this.

Well, I quite often get emails where last post is mine. This seems to happen when email notification type is "daily". Also, it happens with subscriptions to threads, not forums, since i don't have subscriptions to forums. (to clarify: "General" is forum, while "Linux vs Windows megathread" is thread, right? :))
I think that fixing this to the thread subscription shouldn't be difficult. Server just need to check if last replied user ID is equal to subscribers ID, and send "digest" only if they IDs are not equal, that's all.

Yes, I'm sure. With daily notification I always get full posts, including full posts made by people on my ignore list.

Personally I'd prefer to see "user XYZ is on your ignore list" instead of full text - just like I normally see ignored posts in threads. I don't care if ignored person has replied or not, I just don't want to read what was written by that person.

You should never get an email if yours was the only post. If there are new posts and yours is the last one, you will still get an email. We can change the daily subscription to act like the instant one if there is interest. Most members use instant and I'd have thought the members that use the digest would want more info, but I'm open to feedback on that. It's possible a future code upgrade will address the "ignore list for email subscription" issue, although as archtoad6 points out it's not a feature I'd mark with a high priority. Thanks for the feedback.

--jeremy