Or, in other words, "I'm a terrible programmer!". You've probably noticed my plethora of "test" posts recently. After hundreds and hundreds of iterations and many blunders and false starts and dead-end roads, I think we now have in place a custom-made e-mail notification system that we can all be proud of.
The previous system was pretty bad. It sent one notification for every new comment. Many of our users would wake up to find 80 messages in their inbox-- the majority from 1 single thread. Additionally, the system constantly got "jammed" and would throw up ugly error messages and fail to send any notifications at all. So I finally bit the bullet, and learned how to code a bit in PHP, and we now have a significantly better system that won't send you more notifications until you come back to the thread.
To receive e-mail updates for new posts on any thread, just click the "Click to Subscribe" link in the bottom right corner of the first post in the thread. There are also personal settings to automatically subscribe you to every thread you participate in, and to enable/disable all notification emails with one click. By default, all users will be automatically subscribed and will receive email updates. You can set your personal preferences here:
http://budgetlightforum.com/user/ under Edit -> Subscriptions
One very important point: You must make sure to check the Spam folder in your e-mail and mark any BLF notifications as "Not Spam" , since the new BLF notification message seems to be detected as Spam quite frequently.
Please note that the "You are not watching this post, click to start watching" link no longer works for e-mail updates. The list of threads that you have tagged with this system are still available for now, but will probably be removed in the near future. I will give everyone ample warning before disabling the old post watching system.
Please carefully observe the behavior of the new system, and report any anomalies here. But please don't use this thread for "test" posts. Feel free to open a separate "test" thread if desired.
Thanks to everyone for their patience! Have fun.
Update: 26-AUG-2012
I just made some updates to the system to fix two serious issues that were reported to me via PM.
Please note that the method for configuring your personal preferences has changed. The option to disable all subscription emails and the option to disable automatic subscriptions are now located in your user account settings, under the “Edit” tab in the “Subscriptions” section. Anybody who previously changed those settings will need to do so again. Sorry for the inconvenience!
Update: 11-SEP-2012
- Identified and fixed an important bug that was preventing some users from receiving notification e-mails in threads with more than 10 subscribers.
- Identified and fixed a bug where multiple comments in a thread would result in multiple notifications being sent out if the first post was featured on the frontpage.
Update: 24-SEP-2012
- Identified and fixed another bug. The system was mistakenly sending a notification for every comment in a poll thread, instead of checking to see if the user already received a notification.
Update: 01-OCT-2012
- Made a small change to the message header to avoid it being detected as spam.