[shred00]

When I subscribe to a thread and I get e-mails with the contents of the new messages in the thread I subscribed to but this is also included in the e-mail:

There may also be other replies to this thread but you will not receive anymore notifications until you visit the board again.

Why is this? Why do I have to click on a link to open a page to read the exact same message again, just to get any additional messages? How stupid.

How do I disable this stupid feature so that I just always get e-mails of new messages and don't have to click the link in every message I get just to continue to get additional ones?

[nickr]

Because otherwise on a busy thread you are going to be inundated with emails.

[Kib]

We have too many members to enable this.

[shred00]

Because otherwise on a busy thread you are going to be inundated with emails.

No more than I would get with a proper mailing list which I receive plenty of.

[shred00]

We have too many members to enable this.

Too many members to send out a few e-mails? Even proper mailing list servers, where every member receives every e-mail can run on some pretty vintage hardware.

Keeping in mind that not every user subscribes to every thread. In fact I would suspect that the user to subscribed threads is probably pretty low.

And even with that, I suspect the number of users that would opt to receive an e-mail for every message in a thread vs. the current behaviour of 1 e-mail until you visit the thread would be low.

So all in all, the amount of e-mail we are talking about is pretty trivial given even 2000's hardware.

[Kib]

I'm glad you take my word for it. There are multiple reasons why it can't be implemented, and the number of users is just one of them. We are one of the largest mybb forums and the software is limited in several aspects.

[shred00]

I'm glad you understand our limitations

That's not what I said. Please don't put words in my mouth.

I was actually stating that it's not a (very, at all) high hurdle to have to get over. If you already have a server running your forums, chances are (and again, not saying I *know*, just saying "chances are") good that the extra effort of e-mailing thread subscribers (who choose to the option) on every thread posting in threads they subscribe to would be negligible.

Another way to look at it would be to compare the difference in effort (on your server) of sending an e-mail vs. the effort of composing the HTML for a forum thread page when a user comes to visit the forum to read the new message (that they already have a copy of even). I would bet any day that the effort of sending that e-mail is much much lower than the effort of building and sending the HTML to display the page that has the same message (and all of the previous ones, decorations, etc.)

So, net-net, my bet is that if you had users reading the new messages in e-mails rather than visiting the forum for every new message, the net load on your server would actually be lower.

And just for reference I'm not talking completely out of my ass here. I am an Internet software/systems engineer. I have been building Internetworking systems for 25+ years so I know how e-mail and web-serving, etc. work and I understand completely the loads each have on a server.

[Kib]

Great but you ignore what I say. Please fix the limitations in MyBB that occur when you have over 100000 members on your forum - I am not able to. I'll see those fixes and than think of it.

(I'll disregard the fact that you are wrong and sending that many emails is not as simple as you think, especially considering we are not hosting a primary MX for our domain but hey what would I know about that. I'm just the messaging administrator for a large international organisation.)

[shred00]

Please fix the limitations in MyBB that occur when you have over 100000 members on your forum - I am not able to. I'll see those fixes and than think of it.

What does a MyBB member limit have to do with whether e-mails are sent for every message in a subscribed thread or not? Those things are completely orthogonal.

(I'll disregard the fact that you are wrong and sending that many emails is not as simple as you think, especially considering we are not hosting a primary MX for our domain but hey what would I know about that. I'm just the messaging administrator for a large international organisation.)

You are already sending e-mails, so your issue of whether you have an MX or not is a strawman argument. What we are debating here is the volume of e-mails and how allowing people who choose to, receive an e-mail for every posting to a thread they subscribe to without having to visit the forum will actually decrease your load, not increase it.

[Kib]

You believe my arguments are not real, yet your arguments so far are completely theoretical without any real world knowledge of the system and its limitations and based on very very sparse knowledge of mail infrastructure.

You choose to dismiss my posts and my knowledge of our infrastructure. Had you asked for an explanation of the limitations and why they occur I would have gladly given them when I wasn't on my phone.

Instead I'll choose to stop this discussion and give you this: it can't be done easily and we are not interested in it either at this moment.

[shred00]

Yeah, further discussion is going to go nowhere.

I will just have to continue to believe that like most other forums, this one is just interested in driving up click-counts by making people needlessly visit it.

[da-anda]

wtf - we don't need any click counts as we don't have ads anywhere - so what would we gain from it. The forum software simply has some limitations in regards to large forums which would kill the server (not optimized queries and stuff like that). Also handling a mailingllist post likely requires less load than a php process with personalized emails

[Kib]

Yeah I gave up on it, he obviously doesn't read a thing I write.

[Martijn]

Yeah I gave up on it, he obviously doesn't read a thing I write.

Is that what happens when you work 25+ years on Internet things?

[mikeSiLVO]

No, that is what happens nowadays when people think they know everything that might seem relevant in there "field" but don't listen to others that are more knowledgeable because they want things there way... I like to use a famous song when situations like this occur... The Rolling Stones - You Can't Always Get What You Want