Change forum notification settings

mronkko

Currently the Zotero forums seem to send an email notification for a first new post into a thread after I have last visited the thread. This can be problematic.

Consider the following case:
-User A posts a question
-User B posts a response saying that what User A wants to do is not possible
-User B posts a follow up about a workaround that would actually be useful for User A.

Now from the perspective, from User A, he has asked a question and has received an email containing a message that his problem cannot be solved. There is little reason for him to visit the forum again, so he misses the useful workaround presented in a follow-up post.

dstillman

The current behavior (which is the standard behavior of the notification plugin we use) is clearly confusing for some people, but given the activity in these forums the alternative would result in a huge volume of e-mail traffic.

I think it would be fine to just append a note to the notification message:

"You won't receive further notifications until the next time you visit the forums. Check back for further updates, or click the link above to ensure that you receive a notification the next time a message is posted."

mronkko

Would it be possible to have this as a preference on a user level? For users that just post one question, it would be useful to by default receive notifications about all new posts. The people that post frequently could then adjust this by changing their preferences.

dstillman

I don't think it's a user issue—if anything it would depend on the subscription level. For discussion subscriptions, sending on every post makes more sense and would be reasonable in terms of e-mail traffic. The current behavior (perhaps with a note as above) seems fine for forum/category subscriptions, where it's obvious that other posts are coming in and where the alternative would generate too much traffic.

I don't think we'd add an extra user setting here. Probably if you subscribed to the whole forums or a category that would just override the discussion subscription and revert you to the current behavior, so existing power users wouldn't be affected.

adamsmith

just a quick +1 to what mronkko says - the same potential issue he describes occurred to me, too.
I think making subscriptions to threads for all messages would be good and viable.

edit: I mean viable wrt the amount of e-mail. Obviously can't speak to technical viability.

aurimas

IMO the current notification system does not make sense. If I subscribe to a group or a category, I expect to be receiving notifications for all activity, but I shouldn't be expected to visit the forum for every email I get.

I can see how this system _may_ work for single threads, where you might come back to reply to a response someone posted on your thread, but as mronkko pointed out, it's not ideal.

As far as large amount of traffic is concerned, a lot of forums offer daily emails but leave that option up to the user.

I realize that this is probably not a trivial fix, so I don't expect it to change... soon at least.

dstillman

aurimas: As noted above, we'd do the inverse if anything. For forum/category, we're not talking about daily e-mails—we're talking about 100-200 e-mails a day per subscribed user. If you want notification of every message, use the RSS and Atom feeds, which exist for exactly that purpose. I assume all of the regular contributors use one of the feeds.

The concern is about casual users who don't know how to follow feeds, which is why we're talking about changing the per-thread notification (which defaults to on after you post). Thinking about that more, if we did change it to send on every post I think it would have to offer a link in the notification message to unsubscribe from notifications for the thread. Otherwise if someone posted a one-time question to, say, the ZotFile thread, they'd continue to get dozens more messages, get annoyed, and probably mark the message as spam, which is bad for us.

In any case, if this was going to happen it'd likely fall on fcheslack to implement it. It's possible there are other notification plugins with more options for Vanilla 2.

aurimas

I suppose feeds are a viable option. Personally I prefer to receive emails, but I can set that up myself.

FYI, RSS2 and ATOM feed links only show up for the General category. All the other categories are missing those links, though changing the "Categories=General" to whatever you want does work.

aurimas

[Edit by Dan: adamsmith, don't try this at home. It will temporarily crash the server trying to load notification details for every thread you've participated in. It should be OK for everyone but the two of us.)]

FWIW, I found several options under Forum Account Settings that look promising: https://forums.zotero.org/account/ Account Options > Notification

aurimas

RSS2 and ATOM feed links only show up for the General category. All the other categories are missing those links...

This is set in categories_config.php for FeedPublisher but I can see how it can get tedious with the current template that they provide.

adamsmith

[Edit by Dan: adamsmith, don't try this at home. It will temporarily crash the server trying to load notification details for every thread you've participated in. It should be OK for everyone but the two of us.)]

:-)