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Reply notification

Started by remi May 11, 2003 at 1:16 AM 7 replies 500+ views
Original Post
remi
remi
It might be very useful if people could be informed by email when a specific post has a reply, so that u could keep track("stay up-to-date") of some posts of your interest. For example say u post a question and u wait for a reply for some few minutes but nobody answer, then u get busy doing other things, after an hour someone replies asking you to be more specific in your question, then he stays there waiting for you to reply. When you come back replying he is already gone,..... I think that if it works, then gamedev''s server should have a lot more job to handle since a post could have 10,50,100 or even more adresses to whom notifications shall be sent. For all the post and replies gamedev has everyday, it could be a lot D-A-T-A to manage. So to solve that i propose that any post has something like a notification list where u could "add" or "remove" ur email from the specific email list. Any opinion on this topic is welcome.
"...and we all know what "undefined" means: it means it works during development, it works during testing, and it blows up in your most important customers' faces."----------Scott Meyers, "Effective C++"
Sneftel
Sneftel
I''m pretty sure that''s already in place.

How appropriate. You fight like a cow.
remi
remi
Really? I''ve never heard about that!
So what are we supposed to do to get notified when post got replied?
"...and we all know what "undefined" means: it means it works during development, it works during testing, and it blows up in your most important customers' faces."----------Scott Meyers, "Effective C++"
Sneftel
Sneftel
Check the box that says "Check here to be notified by email whenever someone replies to your topic".

How appropriate. You fight like a cow.
remi
remi
Oh that''s right!
I just saw it.

But if it''s not your post?
"...and we all know what "undefined" means: it means it works during development, it works during testing, and it blows up in your most important customers' faces."----------Scott Meyers, "Effective C++"
Myopic Rhino
Myopic Rhino
We have almost 50,000 registered members and 1000 new messges posted every day. Giving people the option to be notified when *any* post has a reply would add unneccessary overhead. Our solution was to create the bookmark feature. If you find a thread you want to track, just click the "Watch this thread" link at the top, and then view it on your bookmarks page.
remi
remi
I saw the "Bookmark" stuff and it''s really cool.

But lets say we have 10 members who bookmarked a topic, then what we need to do now is just is to make the topic bookmark the members not the members to bookmark the topic.
It should not be a big difference as far as saved data(size ) is concerned.

Then when a post get a replied, everything is automatic, it checks all the members bookmarked and send them emails.

I''ve seen that in some forums, and think it might be really great to have it here in GameDEV.
"...and we all know what "undefined" means: it means it works during development, it works during testing, and it blows up in your most important customers' faces."----------Scott Meyers, "Effective C++"
Myopic Rhino
Myopic Rhino
It''s not a question of storage, there are other issues.

First of all, in the past 24 hours, there were 1403 replies to 349 threads, or an average of 4 per thread. Let''s say that on average, 100 people are set to receive email notification when new replies are posted to a thread (based on the current rate of bookmark usage, 100 is conservative). That''s over 140,000 email notifications being sent per day. Our mail server runs on a machine shared with many other processes, and it''s already fairly taxed.

Second, even with just sending email notifications to the original poster, I get around 20 bounce notifications per day due to bad email addresses, full mailboxes, etc. I shudder to think how many I''d receive if anyone could sign up for notification.

Third, the reply process is already the most expensive script that runs on this site. Prior to me making some improvements in March, it was timing out on a regular basis. The impact of adding multiple email notifications to the script would not be insignificant.

Fourth, all of the previous three issues could probably be overlooked if we didn''t already have a mechanism in place that serves the same purpose (the bookmarks). Not only does it serve the same function, it does so far more efficiently.

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