I think I have figured out why I have not been receiving notifications. This sentence in the notification emails seems to hold the key: "You will not receive any further emails about this thread until you have read the new messages."
I suspect that the new forum software has no record of which messages I've last read - until I go and view all the latest messages of the "watched" (subscribed) threads.
So, I've made a point now to go and view the "new messages" in all the threads listed on my Watched threads page. I'll see if it helps.
I suspect that the new forum software has no record of which messages I've last read - until I go and view all the latest messages of the "watched" (subscribed) threads.
So, I've made a point now to go and view the "new messages" in all the threads listed on my Watched threads page. I'll see if it helps.
Yes, I'm talking about my watched threads. If there are new posts in any of them, you should get a notification by email, provided you're up to date viewing them before the new posts arrive. I.o.w. you'll only get one notification per thread.
I just want to make sure that you understand how the watched threads feature works. If you visit your watched threads page and there are any threads in listed in bold, you have to visit those threads and scroll to the very last message in each of the threads in bold. After that, you should receive notifications when new messages are posted.
So... is this the reason why "mark forums read" now has such importance and requires such prominence in XF? Possibly. And Possibly then we should run an automatic "mark forums read" for all users to mark all threads as read so they'll get notifications of old threads they will not have visited?
If that's what's easiest. I would imagine that there are two lists, one is the list of a user's watched threads, the other is a list of what's been read in those threds. The first list moved over, the second did not. At least it behaves that way.
I wonder if the issue is simply that on vBulletin, every time you came back to the forum you effectively hit the "Mark Forums Read" button. Every page view. Is that the case, and the totality of the change in behaviour? And thus something we should re-implement if that's how members are used to it?
Or was that just a spam-generator?
I'm certainly used to how it used to work and am now missing threads if I don't click on each and every new discussion email (and my inbox is now thousands of emails deep, I lost the inbox zero war last year).
Or was that just a spam-generator?
I'm certainly used to how it used to work and am now missing threads if I don't click on each and every new discussion email (and my inbox is now thousands of emails deep, I lost the inbox zero war last year).
XF UX paradigm is personalized content discovery, and implanting a change like this would break that. New posts, watched threads (with default filter), etc. would all be useless as nothing would be new, and there’d be no new updates for watched threads.
Alerts won’t re-alert if you haven’t read the thread since the first alert although sometimes back-to-back alerts will come in for posts that are close together. It can be annoying if someone uses alerts as their primary way of discovering what’s new in the items they’re watching, and if you’re used to vB where the notifications were the only way to know what new posts were relevant to you without having to go read each forum.
However in XF you can just go to Watched Threads and see every subscribed thread with new posts, and when you click them you get taken to exactly where you left off the last time you read the thread. After viewing a thread just click Watched Threads again and you’ve an updated list, and you can remove the ’unread’ filter with one click to see every thread you’ve subscribed to. The same functionality exists for Watched Forums. Alerts and e-mail notifications quickly become redundant noise.
Thanks JP!
I'm definitely used to the forum bugging the heck out of me about threads, and I like that because if I miss something I know eventually I'll get another reminder about another post in that thread in the future as soon as a visit the forum again as my trigger that I'm back. Now I might miss one email and miss out on months of posts. Not sure that's a great change. Possibly, if we also implemented weekly digest updates of "What you missed in your watched threads".
I'm definitely used to the forum bugging the heck out of me about threads, and I like that because if I miss something I know eventually I'll get another reminder about another post in that thread in the future as soon as a visit the forum again as my trigger that I'm back. Now I might miss one email and miss out on months of posts. Not sure that's a great change. Possibly, if we also implemented weekly digest updates of "What you missed in your watched threads".