Notifications/alerting question

[Steve Marak]

I've used a number of forums, but every platform is a little different, so I'm learning my way around this one ... bear with me please.

The text under the "Notifications" tab in "My Account" says to use the "Notify" button when looking at the index of a board to start receiving notifications for that board. I can't find a "Notify" button on that page, but a quick trial and error verified that it's the button that says "No Alerts or Emails". Easy enough.

Am I right in thinking that I can't do global notification set up either from the "Notifications" tab in "My Account", or from the "Forum" page (the one that lists all the available boards) - I have to go dive into each board individually and turn on notifications? It looks like I can modify settings in "My Account", but not establish them?

Thanks,

Steve

[David Pilling]

Hi Steve

I fear that is how it is - lots of work turning on notifications for each board by hand - and if the number of boards changes you won't know. No global setting.

I gather people are not keen on forum software churning out a lot of emails.

We might install an extension that sends out a digest of posts each day.

I'd be happy if someone tells me I am wrong...

[Robin Hansen]

Now that I've been receiving notifications by email of responses on the forum long enough, I'm beginning to remember to log in to the forum without a reminder which is probably how it should be. We could continue the notifications for a short period when we first go fully forum as a training exercise...

[Steve Marak]

Not to be a Debbie Downer, but that's one of the reasons I've come to dislike forums (vs email) - email comes to me, all in one place, and I can work with it online or offline. I have to remember to go to every forum to which I belong and see what's new, and I can only do that when online. I've been pretty active in several forums (fora?) in the past but over time ...

[David Pilling]

A forum will be different to a list, in moving to a forum PBS is gambling that enough new users plus old users who can manage the new format will outweigh the old users who can't get on with a forum. Not every user is going to see every post - it's unlikely that is true of the list but that is the mode of operation of the list.

The valid criticism of the old list is that groups.io does mail lists a lot better, I've never had to re-post a photo on groups.io, the level of effort I have to put in to running the lily list on groups.io (dealing with bounces, people leaving and joining) is nothing like that for the PBS list.

We get lots of people saying what a great resource the PBS list archive is - "don't take it away". Consider what a resource 20 years of a forum would be, with the 1000s of photos it would have accrued.

[David Pilling]

Debbie - do you accept the current list format can't continue, due to the poor performance in the hands of non-technical users - people who can't post photos and repost entire digests without having a clue why that is a problem. The daily workload behind the scenes - dealing with email bounces.

If so what should be the replacement?

I could fix the problems with mailman (current list software) - but I can't be bothered, and PBS has a directive against writing code.

The people behind groups.io have made a business out of fixing the mail list (they had long experience at Yahoo groups). I've never been able to find better, free mail list software than mailman.

It's not good thinking to say we'd like a mail list but because we can't afford groups.io and can't find a freebie, we'll do something entirely different.