Hi Folks,

I had to disable email notification, and below you will see how you can still check on your subscribed threads.

Why: We are receiveing thousands of "bounced" emails. Our forum sends out notification for new replies to threads you have subscribed to. If your email address is no longer valid, your ISP returns the email to us, with various explanation of either delays, or the email is no longer valid. This happens when you register with one email, and then change ISPs but forget to update your profile.

This is resulting in huge backlog of thousands of emails that are being sent every day and returned to us, waisting a lot of resources and bandwidth.

As it is extremely difficult to go through all these returned emails, and identify the members and contact them, one by one, to change their profiles with the new emails account, we decided to diable email notifications until we find a way to resolve this problem.

In the mean time, here's what you can do to check on all the updates to your subscribed threads

1. Click on "Profile"

2. At the bottom of the page, you will see a list of "Subscribed Threads" in the last day

3. To see all subscribed threads, check the popup list titled "Show threads from ", and select the number of days you want to check, or select "from the beginning"

This will list all threads you have subscribed to and requested to be notified about when there is a new reply.

If you have any questions on how to use this feature, please feel free to ask.

Wa'il

Wail, I understand what you are saying about the e-mail, but am I correct in thinking that we will be getting back to recieving our e-mails like we used to???

This is a great forum and I don't mean to complain, but guess I am. Thanks joan

It will be back, but it may take a while until we find a way to resolve the problem of thousands of invalid "bouncing" emails.

Wa'il

Well going to my profile didn't help either, because when I went there it said that I had NO subscribed threads. That's impossible because till now I have been getting e-mail notifications from about 20 of them! Ummm...huh?...lol

Is there an easy way you can wipe just the email field from all of our profiles? Then we could simply reenter our email addresses if we want the notification. Or is it just not that simple?

hi Sam,

When folks register, the default setting in the profile was to receive email notification whenever someone replies to ANY and ALL threads that you participated in. This is NOT the same thing as subscribing to the thread. Many members chose to turn this off, and then subscribe to the specific threads they're most interested in ... such as their own and friends' journals, and favourite threads in Triple Digits or recipes, whatever. To subscribe to a thread, you must click on where it says "subscribe to this thread" right below the messages in that thread.

OK, once you've subscribed to your favourite threads, they will be listed on the main page of your User Control Panel. Just click on the "profile" icon at the top right of every forum page to go there. Any subscribed thread that has a new post since your last visit will be shown there, with a direct link right from that page to read it, or to post a reply. By clicking on "show all subscribed threads" you can see the full list of your selections, including threads that do not have any new posts in them.

Maybe you could put your User Control panel in your browser's Favorites or Bookmarked file for quick access. Some folks find it easier to have everything right there on one page, than having to go back to your email inbox to click on the links one by one.


Hopefully it will just be temporary

Doreen

Well, it was sure nice and convenient to get the email notifications...help us stay in touch with one another, but this way works too.

Thanks for all ya'll do in keeping the forum going, and if we get the email notification back later.....that would be fab

No need to wipe out emails, since you can edit them any time. Just make sure you enter a valid email, or else it won't send the confirmation link to the correct address.

If I wipe out all emails myself, many members will be stuck if they don't remember their passwords, as this is the only way to retreive passwords, by entering the email address that matches what you registered with..

Wa'il

This means no replies today. You have to click that little box to change it to 30 days or "from the beginning".

It will show you every thread you used to get notified about by email.

Wa'il

ya this sucks.

I understand though.

Any idea how many distinct users account for the bulk of the bounces?

How about this idea - keep the e-mail notification enabled but, if someone's e-mail gets bounced that person's e-mail notification is turned off and they are either PM'ed or have an announcement come up the nect time they log in.

It's around a couple of thousand members, and results in a couple of hundred bounced emails a day.



I started doing that, and have written a script where I type in the email address, it will go and find the member with that email, and then automatically unsubscribe them from all threads.

I had the energy to use it for a couple of days, but it turned out to be a time consuming process, and it may unfairly unsubscribe members who have valid emails, but their ISP's are experiencing some difficulties with their email servers.

So, the best solution would be to:

1. Have the script work automatically, at the MTA level whenever an email bounces.

2. Allow a mechanism (not available until vB 3.0) to disable email notification, without unsubscribing members from their subscribed threads (I got some complaints, as some members were using their profile control panel to monitor subscribed threads).

Step 2 is doable, but would require modifications to vB's database. And since vB 3.0 is coming out soon, and already have that capability (of subscribing with and without notification option), I thought I'd just wait for the vB 3.0 release, instead of investing some time in adding such feature that will be provided by vB anyway.

But I do appreciate how important email notifications are to most members, and I miss it myself. The good news is that vB 3.0 is just around the corner, and they finished two beta test private releases already. So it's almost there

Wa'il

Sounds good.

To filter the temporary ISP problems from the permanent problems, perhaps there can be a threshold. I guess one way would be to tolerate the bounced e-mails for a certain number of days before modifying their settings. Don't know how easy that would be.