On other forums I visit that use the same software as the SDMB, they only send you one e-mail when someone responds to a thread in which you have posted, and you don’t get another e-mail until the next time you go to that thread.
But SDMB sends me an e-mail for every subsequent post to the thread.
Why?
It’s annoying to have my mailbox filled with a dozen duplicate messages, and more importantly, it would seem to put a heavier load on the already overworked SDMB servers than needed.
I totally agree, I very early on just decided it wasn’t worth it to have them e-mail me when my thread got replies. I get about a dozen “Reply to message yaddayaddayadda” in my inbox.
What you describe in your first paragraph is the way it’s supposed to work here, too. Except that it doesn’t. Sometimes. Note the the message you receive says this: “There may be other replies also, but you will not receive any more notifications until you visit the board again.”
I’m subscribed to a couple threads right now and I’ve only been receiving a single notification of additional replies. So, like I said. It works properly . . . sometimes. I suspect it’s yet one more visible symptom of our over-taxed server that people receive multiple notifications.
We are on an older version of the vB software and it is quite possible that a fix may have been implemented for this problem.
However, the tech staff is also overworked (as well as the server) and this is pretty far down on the list of Things To Do Today.
There does seem to be a correlation between the beating the board gets on a regular basis and email weirdness. When things are particularly slammed around here is when I get an uptick in email myself . . . from new registrations that can’t get the authorization email, from existing members changing their password or email address and encountering the same problem. Apparently when the server gets really busy, it literally throws its little electronic hands up and drops whatever requests it has that it cannot immediately fulfill. Email requests get dropped first – and I think is the last to be picked up again when the server refreshes. But it’s hit and miss. You might get 1, you might get more, and there’s no way of predicting this one way or the other.
We are sorry you’re inconvenienced. I just don’t know what we can do about it, at least right this second.
I’m not sure this is a bug in vB, at least not all the time. Note what commasense said,
How does vB determine if you have visited the thread? By the access sequence. Let’s say you get an email notification, but before you get to read it, you visit the thread, perhaps by posting, refreshing or maybe going to another page in the same the thread already open in a window. The next posting will send you another email. Is that a dupe? No, because you “visited” the thread inbetween.
Now you go to your mailbox and find two notifications. In this case, I don’t think it is a bug.
I guess the way we could test this is to subscribe to an active thread, close all SDMB windows, clean out all emails, and stay logged out for a while. Then, without logging in to SDMB, check your mailbox for dupes. Any volunteers?
Good thinking, Musicat. It may not actually be a bug, just the result of staying on the board for hours on end.
I’ll stay off the board for the next couple of hours, and if you (and anyone else looking in) will post a couple of messages after this one, I’ll report back later this afternoon.
Due to timeouts & errors, I wasn’t even sure my previous post had made it to the promised land, so it looked like a good time to try my own experiment.
I viewed an active, subscribed thread (not this one, the one about PETA and Santa Claus), cleaned out my mailbox (which already had three notifications for that thread a few minutes apart, so I’m sure I was subscribed), then logged off. I even disconnected from the Internet for almost 2 hours.
Reconnecting, relogging in, re-checking email, I find no new notifications about that thread. Checking the thread, I find 12 new posts in the last two hours.
I would say that confirms my theory, although I’m not saying that vB can’t go haywire other times and spew out more emails than a super-spammer on uppers.
It’s also possible that vB counts visits to anywhere on the Board as a whole, not just to individual threads. Which would mean that it has to send out more e-mails, but on the other hand, it has to keep track of less information for each user or thread. So it might not be a burden, overall.
I’m betting that it counts any visit to the Board, not just that thread. Because if I’m on the board, reading another forum or thread, I’ll get multiple notifications if multiple posts are made to a subscribed thread.
Sometimes, I get no notifications for a whole day or longer. Then, after having surfed for an hour or so, I will get nofifications of everything all at once. Most of them are duplicates. It’s not unusual for me to get12 notifications for a thread with 12 new replies. And they don’t always come in order.
I think Chronos and Kat are right. The pattern I’ve consistently noticed is that if I’m active on the board, I get a notification for every post to every thread I’ve subscribed to, but if I’m not active, I get one notfication until I visit the boards again.
I get duplicate emails like crazy. My solution is to set aside a special folder in my email service for SDMB messages and automatically route all messages from “webmaster@straightdope.com” to the SDMB folder. Depending on your e-mail service you may or may not have this option, but I do believe most email client programs and webmail services support this.
Once all the SDMB messages are set aside I can delete the ones that are duplicates.