Forums » Suggestions & Development Discussion » Changes to E-Mails of Activity?

Whoops, my bad! Should be fixed in the next round of emails, accolade on its way.

As a corollary -- if you click the link to the forum name, does it still bring you to the right topic?

Oh, yes. The links themselves worked a treat, took me right to the latest posts on the topics I'm watching.

Oh good, so I only half broke it. I'll take that win!

Thank you for all your help!

Very welcome! Considering what a huge overhaul this seems to be, that there haven't been any truly major issues is laudable.

Very kind of you to say.

I got a problem now. It isnt alerting me to private messages.

Update: just read above more closely and i understand now so sorry.

My emails have halt completely on any new pms I got

Notifications of activity now take longer to arrive. I've had them arrive nearly instantly before; now it takes five to ten minutes. It's actually made me begin to go to the main RPR page more frequently and refresh to see if there's activity, which is why I know the time frame. I've seen activity shown five to ten minutes old without an e-mail to show for it.

Ya well I would like to get emails instantly for pms since I like to multitask and use my email to inform me the moment my partners send me a pm

Doing so isn't really that feasible anymore I'm afraid. The delay between messages is only 15 minutes max; in practice it'll be shorter than that frequently. The emails are sent out at every 15 minutes in an hour (:00, :15, :30 and :45) so if someone posts at you at 0:25, you get the email in just 5 minutes. Gmail sometimes doesn't deliver my emails for that long to my inbox, so it's never really been very instant.

As much as you enjoy instant notifications, I never enjoyed having an active PM discussion and getting 10+ emails spamming my inbox in a matter of 10 minutes. This new system doesn't just prevent the server from working too hard, it also stops RPR spamming my inbox by condensing it into a single email and not telling me I got a new PM when I already read it 2 minutes ago. I had turned email features off due to the spammy way everything came to my inbox, and I'm glad I can finally enable them again!

I understand it's mildly inconvenient for you to not receive everything instantly anymore, but the trade-offs are more efficient for a majority of the members this way. If you want to be notified while multitasking, you can open the chat window for PMs and let it make a sound when a new message arrives?

I don't know; I'd argue that being notified of a message just read is also a minor inconvenience. And that doesn't really help with things like actively watched forum topics; when I had messages for posts I already read, it was easy as you please to hit Ctrl-A then Delete. Saving the RPR servers a bit of hassle is a fine enough reason, I suppose, though I'd say that there are plenty of users who didn't mind the spam in the slightest.

Is there any way it could be an opt-in option to have more frequent e-mails, maybe?

I suppose your right sanne, but I like rhygars idea for users that don't mind being spammed to opt in for instant notified of new messages

I think it's one option or the other, not both. Kim rewrote the entire system and abandoned the old one for many good reasons, I don't see it as being beneficial to make server maintain two systems - that makes for the strain of the old system + the 'strain' of the new system combined, and then we're back at the starting position. From a programming perspective I'd never bother maintaining two separate ways of handling emails, personally.

The bottom line is that the new system has more pros than cons compared to the old system, which makes it a better choice all around.

Edit: but Kim has all final says in this matter, I'm just sharing my thoughts on this.

Oh, no, I never meant to imply that the old system should even exist anymore. In addition the reasons you mentioned, it would just be a pain in the butt Kim doesn't need to try and marry two systems never meant to be in the same digital zip code together.

I meant to ask, rather, if there could be an addition to the new system to allow more frequent e-mails. If not instant, maybe let users opt-in for different increments; ten minutes, five minutes, whatever.

For the record, I don't want the old system back. I don't understand code a whit, but I don't believe any of the admin here make changes like this willy-nilly for the lawlz. I believe there were good reasons for it. I'm just asking if it can be tweaked for options reminiscent of the older system--without, again, actually using the older system--that users may want.

I agree with Rhygar for the addition of the insta-messages option. I find it useful during work when im bored and its slow. But, I know the hassles of basic coding and the sheer number of variables that would need changed is probably more inconvinced then its worth. If i where doing the code and stuff i would put this to the side for now and maybe come back to it when i had time to spare.

Either way, thanks kim for everything.

Although we may eventually add new minimum options (Say, every 10 minutes, maybe even every five minutes), we will never again be offering instant emails. I'm really sorry. I know some of you had gotten used to that and were using it.

It's just that emails aren't push notifications, and although we'd sort of been using them that way, we shouldn't, and frankly, can't anymore.

I'm not worried about Server. He can handle it. In fact, the new system is comparatively a little bit harder on him because it requires Server to think about whether an email is really necessary, and if so, can it be combined with any others?

I'm worried that when we blast out 10 identical emails over a 10 minute period to the same person, because they have one PM conversation that got really busy while they were sleeping, that person's email service is very likely to flag us as a spammer. That means NO ONE using that service can reliably get emails from us anymore, no matter how badly they want them.

Then I have to spend hours, sometimes days, often weeks, working with that provider to prove we are not a spammer, only to start the process over again when the volume of identical emails triggers another one. Recently this happened so spectacularly with Microsoft emails (hotmail, live, outlook, etc) that although they swore they had un-blacklisted us, their system had such a beef with us that I haven't been able to get an automatic email confirmation message to anyone who signed up with one of those addresses for about two months. I've had to start every morning writing half a dozen welcome messages by hand.

Back in the old days when there were a few hundred members, we didn't send out enough emails in a day to raise red flags no matter what. Today there's over 10k of you, and if we don't send email responsibly, we won't be able to send email at all.

The new system is designed to solve this issue in several ways, one of which being that it eliminates unbatched, possibly unnecessary, instant notification emails.

With great membership comes great responsibility!

I suspect at this point that simply creating an on-site system that checks for new PMs and notifies you in the browser without the need for a refresh is a much more safe and sane solution than shooting ourselves with our own emails.

Most of that makes sense, and I do thank you for taking the time to answer so clearly. I would just ask two questions, then: What about posts to a topic, like this one or a role-play topic or the like? And--I have no idea what "creating an on-site system" is or means, so I wouldn't have a clue how to do it.

I'm not sure what the question is?

It would mean I would change the way the site works so that there was some way to see if there was a new PM without having to refresh the page to check.

This already exists for topics in the form of homepage notifications, where forum topic replies appear rapidly without the need to refresh.

You answered my first question with your second answer.

I was asking about quicker notifications for topics, as I didn't know forum topics appeared quickly on the home page.