How can I get email notifications of the new posts?

[forksfitness]

Forum URL: forum.forksfitness.com

I'd like to be instantly notified of when someone joins or posts to our forum. Is there anyway I could set up my email or phone to give out notifications like this?

[Brian]

Hi, forksfitness.

All possible email notifications are listed in Profile > Edit Profile > Notifications. We don't offer any email notifications beyond what's listed there.

[David Clark]

forksfitness, there is a notification setting in the area Brian mentioned that can email you when a new member joins and while there isn't a setting to automatically email you whenever a post is made, there is a workaround. Your forum has an RSS feed that shows a running list of new/updated topics, so you could plug the feed into a service that sends you a notification email whenever it's updated. Try Googling around for one.

[Martin Rose]

Couldn't you add this functionality in the core? It seems like an oversight to me.
I've had one of my users ask me for this already.

[Gruev]

For me this is a big issue! I want when I anticipate in a thread to get notification with update instantly. I cannot think of a reason to lack this feature. If this is not available I will switch to another forum. 

[Gruev]

Nov 3, 2013 9:50:47 GMT -8 David Clark said:

forksfitness, there is a notification setting in the area Brian mentioned that can email you when a new member joins and while there isn't a setting to automatically email you whenever a post is made, there is a workaround. Your forum has an RSS feed that shows a running list of new/updated topics, so you could plug the feed into a service that sends you a notification email whenever it's updated. Try Googling around for one.

This is not a workaround. I have made some board "not-public" so you have to be logged in user with rights to get the content. And the RSS feed shows only global public events. Is there a workaround for this ?

[Craig]

It is not an oversight inasmuch as it has always consciously not being included for various reason. I think it is considered that a forum is either active and thus will have posts or not active and wont have new posts.

There have always been issues in the past of servers getting blocked by email providers because of high volumes of emails and so that was taken into consideration.

That is only two reasons out of many and the cons have always previously outweighed the pros.

Whether this is still the case or not or whether it will be added at some point, i dont know, but hopefully one of the staff members can update us on that

[David Clark]

During the course of v5's development, it was once possible to configure your notifications section to email you every time a thread you participated in was updated. During the time that this was possible, many users were marking the participated emails as spam when they no longer wished to receive them instead of disabling the notification setting in their profile, and the result had been that a few email providers (especially certain ISPs) were beginning to automatically detect our emails as spam and trash them without ever showing them to the account holder, causing problems for new ProBoards members using the same email provider.

Now that we've toned it down a bit, you can have a daily digest of participated emails sent to you, and that's help to alleviate some of the issues of the previous system. I can only imagine the same issues would arise if it was possible to email yourself whenever any post was made.

Nov 7, 2013 5:25:46 GMT -8 Gruev said:

This is not a workaround. I have made some board "not-public" so you have to be logged in user with rights to get the content. And the RSS feed shows only global public events. Is there a workaround for this ?

Unfortunately, short of that solution, the only other course of action to get an update on forum activity would be to actually go to your forum and check things out.

[Martin Rose]

My board is very low traffic. It is a closed user group of max. 60 people. There won't be much emailing of new posts on mine at all, but that makes it all the more important users are notified of new posts because they are so scarce.

1st thing that comes to mind regarding server overload, is to:

i). batch the msgs. up so fewer are sent per day,

ii). allow different attributes for different board categories (ie; some cats. would not have this turned on, whilst other would),

iii). once over a free certain threshold, introduce quotas per board (make people buy quotas in advance like you do for removing the advertising). You could then use this money to pay for emailing services, if it becomes a problem.

[David Clark]

Thanks for your input, Martin Rose. I'll mark this thread as a feature request so your notes can be found by our devs later on.

[Martin Rose]

Any progress on this feature yet?

[Michael]

Jan 10, 2014 6:35:52 GMT -8 Martin Rose said:

Any progress on this feature yet?

It is highly unlikely that this feature will become a reality for the simple fact that more emails means more people block us (email providers) who in turn we have to go speak to about unblocking us after a bunch of people report us for spam (even though they requested the email).

At last discussion of of this our Sysadmin was very opposed, but keep an eye on the Development blog in case something changes!

[Martin Rose]

You could put a strongly-worded message in every email, requesting not to block but to de-request instead?

This would be a very useful feature for my board.

[Sophia]

Jan 10, 2014 9:55:53 GMT -8 Michael said:

It is highly unlikely that this feature will become a reality for the simple fact that more emails means more people block us (email providers) who in turn we have to go speak to about unblocking us after a bunch of people report us for spam (even though they requested the email).

At last discussion of of this our Sysadmin was very opposed, but keep an eye on the Development blog in case something changes!

I'd be interested in this feature too.

Just an idea: you could make it possible by throttling the emails if the volume is more than 10 per hour (or whatever is considered high traffic)... or even make it a daily email like you did with the participated threads.

[David Clark]

Unfortunately the systems team are the only ones capable of truly understanding the potential repercussions of a feature like this, but the thread is indeed still marked as a feature request, so they will have the opportunity to go over whether or not it would be feasible later on down the line.

As a side note, Sophia - your forum does not require guests to log in, and therefore your recent posts page is available to anyone. You could run a search for "page monitor" or "page watcher" on Google and look for a service that emails you when changes have been made to a web page - that could be one way to receive notifications for new posts.