Let’s say I participate in a thread, and sometime after I’m no longer paying attention, another poster decides to respond directly to something I’ve said by quoting my post.
Is there any way to set up an automatic PM that says, “Hey, someone just quoted you in this thread over here; you might want to go check it out”?
I usually do monitor the activity of threads I’ve posted in via the “Posts Made By: Wheelz” page, but by the time something falls off the front page it’s usually either a dead thread or I’ve lost interest, so I rarely go beyond there. Sometimes I wonder if I’ve ever missed somebody responding to something I said a while ago.
I’m pretty sure something like this used to exist but at some point when they were going through the upgrade process a couple of years or so back the capability was not carried forward. Pity because it was one of the more useful and practical tools.
ETA: Thinking about it, I believe it was less an “alert” and more something that you could perform a search on.
Yes, but (in my case) it also brings up discussions of a TV program about a vampire-slayer that I’ve not taken part in. Of course, I should have chosen a more distinctive name, like “Wheelz”.
Plus, now that Giles has used my name here, this thread will forever appear in a vanity search, but I won’t know if it’s because of that post or a subsequent quoting.
The only alert like this built into vBulletin is the default thread subscription settings, which are a little blunt: you pretty much only have the option to get notified every single time a thread you post in gets replied to at all. I’m not sure why anyone would want this option turned on.
There are vB hacks to do what you want (this one, for version 3, and this one for version 4), but I doubt the admins are going to want to install them – they’ll hit the database a lot harder (as every quoted post now has to query if the user wants a PM) and given our tiny PM quotas will probably fill people’s inboxes up too fast to be useful.
So the vanity search is probably the way to go. Here’s a direct link to a vanity search w. various options that you can bookmark for quick access:
For the future, how about a Google alert? Set the search for something like ‘site:boards.straightdope.com “originally posted by wheelz”’ plus additional keywords.
I just did it exactly as you described, and searching for the name of the poster with the initials F-P, whose full name appears in the quote box of your first post, as a keyword. He is named, outside quote boxes, in two threads of this subforum; this thread doesn’t appear. Repeating the exercise but asking for results shown as posts yields three results, again none of them here (most recent from 08-24-2010). Until somebody spells the name out outside quote boxes, the thread won’t show up at all in keyword searches on the name.
That will find all posts that quote the user named, but the results will be ordered by arcane Google formulas, not by date or anything so straightforward.
The order of the results is a little wonky. Go to the side menu, click “Show search tools” and hit “Latest” - that will put them in chronological order.
Ah, yes, I see - sorry for the mistake here; when I did a test search yesterday on a particular user name in a thread, I didn’t realize it, but that user name was also mentioned once outside the quote box, so that’s what the search picked up.
That last part may make me more likely to be able to get back to threads. I honestly often forget which threads I’ve posted in, so I usually just wait for them to pop back on top.