Subscribe to sub-forum broken?

Discussion in 'Bug Reporting' started by stop4stuff, Oct 23, 2013.

  1. stop4stuff
    stop4stuff Well-Known Member
    It has been a long time since I have been as active as I used to be here on Shapeways forums, however, I still have the 'modeller needed' sub-forum as a subscription - for some reason over the last six months or so, the email notices last only maybe 5 or 7 days tops - I log in, it stills says 'unsubscribe' at the top of the forum, however to get notifications coming through again, I have to unsubscribe then subscribe again.

    A paranoid person might think that someone is purposely switching off these email notifications, but not me, no one has it in for me, I hope, well except maybe that person whose name begins with J... ;)

    Is this a real issue or is it just another 'one of those things' that I have to put up with?

    Cheers,
    Paul
     
  2. stop4stuff
    stop4stuff Well-Known Member
    lol...

    so since posting this, what, some 35 minutes ago, guess what, the forum subscribe bit is working again. An email notfication has come through for a topic post at 18:56 (BST = GMT+1).

    So now I am asking, WTF is going on?

    Should I be paranoid?

    Paul
     
  3. mkroeker
    mkroeker Well-Known Member
    Hmm. I sometime receive forum notifications out of sequence and/or with a few days delay (for individual threads I was involved in, but that is probably not different from whole forum subscriptions). Could be related to your problem (and to the recent general hickups in shapeways' server environment) ?
     
  4. Youknowwho4eva
    Youknowwho4eva Well-Known Member
    I've inquired if there is a known issue, when I have an answer I'll update.
     
  5. stannum
    stannum Well-Known Member
    Maybe SNAFU?

    Also, have you noticed if the "Developers" header in main forum page appears and disappears? Like if Shapeways API and ShapeJS just got moved into Support.
     
  6. Youknowwho4eva
    Youknowwho4eva Well-Known Member
    We have noticed. We're working on fixing it.
     
  7. mkroeker
    mkroeker Well-Known Member
    Guess that only tells us something about the frequency of their user interface design meetings but should not affect functionality :)
    (at least in English one cannot have warring factions trying to feminize nouns for political correctness)
     
  8. stop4stuff
    stop4stuff Well-Known Member
    The issue with non-email notifications to only the modeller needed forum has been going on for some months - I thought it may have been originally due to me not signing in for a while... but then, the timing of emails stopping is not an automated thing... it has human-like random timing - just an observation.

    And for the message coming through I mentioned in post 2, I did not unsubscribe/resubscribe - it happened on its own this one time only.

    Paul
     
  9. Hey guys,

    We turned off "New Topic" notifications on the forum (ie: email notification when someone creates a new thread in Developers) as it was spamming people (thousands of unwanted emails every day with no way to unsubscribe, yuck). Initially we suppressed a large number of them, today we're shutting them off entirely. We still have reply notification (ie: the email you'll get when I post this reply in the thread) but for the time being we won't have new topic emails. We figure instead of spending our time battling the forum email hydra, we can instead explore better methods for you to communicate with other users and potential customers on our site.
     
  10. mkroeker
    mkroeker Well-Known Member
    No chance to make this a user-configurable option ? While it does not affect me personally, it seems obvious to me that a freelance designer
    might want to be alerted to the fact that there is a new job offer in the "Modelers wanted" section.
     
  11. stop4stuff
    stop4stuff Well-Known Member
    huh?

    WTF has this to do with my experience over the last few months with my subscription to the 'modeller needed' forum?
    Or if I read correctly, rather than fixing something that was not working correctly you just turn it on & off at will???

    My opinion of Shapeways has dropped another notch. :(

    Paul
     
  12. mkroeker
    mkroeker Well-Known Member
    Reply notification appears to be broken today,seems your forum email hydra has grown some new hydrants ?
     
  13. stop4stuff
    stop4stuff Well-Known Member
  14. Paul-- apologies for missing your PMs, in testing a bunch of email preferences I turned off forum notifications :confused

    The answer to the new topic notification emails is still the same: we can't reliably support these emails without them alternatively spamming people or not working right now. As far as I'm aware, topic reply notifications are working, but if you have examples otherwise from the past few days please let me know.
     
  15. mkroeker
    mkroeker Well-Known Member
    I must say that I do not quite understand what the problem is - is unsubscribing from a forum fundamentally broken ? Otherwise, it would seem to me that it is our own choice to get spammed by subscribing to a forum - and I have seen and survived really high volume mailing lists that had more messages per hour than I would expect to be generated by any forum here in a day. (Besides, the classical answer to this would be message digests).
     
  16. stop4stuff
    stop4stuff Well-Known Member
    afaik, post reply email notfications are fine.

    I with mkroeker, I don't understand what the issue is either.
    I people are clever enough to subscribe to a forum, then one would think the are clever enough to unsubscribe.
    If some people are considering new post notifications as spam, then surely a reminder about their options should suffice.
    I have a spam policy and am pro-active with enforcing my policy, one spammer once told me one man's spam is another man's income. Now with this Shapeways forum situation the opposite is true, lack of notifications means potential lost income.

    I know you can't please all of the people all of the time, but I surely do miss just being able to open an email and find out what someone would like modelled.

    Paul
     
  17. It wasn't a problem in people understanding how it worked, it was a tech issue where users who never intended to subscribe were suddenly getting hundreds of emails and unable to make them stop. There wasn't an easy way to fix this issue and keep sending those particular emails at this time.
     
  18. mkroeker
    mkroeker Well-Known Member
    Wouldn't it be possible to insert another "are you really really REALLY sure" dialog in the subforum subscription process, so that even naive users have to realize what will happen to their dog and firstborn child ?
    Or limit subscriptions to shop owners or repeat customers to weed out the curious have-to-click-on-everything crowd ?
     
  19. drloris
    drloris Well-Known Member
    I may just not be smart enough, but I can't figure out how to unsubscribe from an apparently popular topic I posted on.
    I clearly wasn't smart enough to untick the on-by-default "post notification" checkbox.
    I've had several emails in the last hour - they have a link "If you do not wish to receive further notifications about replies in this topic, please go here", but that apparently doesn't work.

    I'd quite like to get notifications to other, low-volume topics, so unsetting the "Forum message & reply notifications" setting is undesirable (if that even works).

    Anyone know how to do it?
     
  20. Youknowwho4eva
    Youknowwho4eva Well-Known Member
    drloris,

    Email service, they should be able to help you turn off the notifications.