New notification arrangements on the CASINO forum

How to use these forums. Announcements of new versions of CASINO, summer schools and workshops, etc.
Post Reply
Mike Towler
Posts: 239
Joined: Thu May 30, 2013 11:03 pm
Location: Florence
Contact:

New notification arrangements on the CASINO forum

Post by Mike Towler »

Dear all,

Many people have complained recently that they were not getting email notifications of new topics on the CASINO Forum website, even though they are supposedly 'subscribed' to the five individual subject forums ('General Announcements', 'The CASINO program etc.). I didn't notice this myself, as I always got the notifications.

I've now come to understand this is almost certainly because of the software's default 'Don't Be Annoying' policy, whereby once subscribed to a forum you are emailed a notification of a new topic once, but then never again until you personally visit the Forum website and login with your User ID. Given that most people just read the forum posts, and don't bother to login to reply to them, this means that hardly anybody was getting any notifications even if they'd specifically requested them (except me, because I login frequently to respond to user questions, and to do site admin).

With the standard forum software that I use (phpbb3) there is no way to modify that behaviour. Either it behaves as above, or you don't get any notifications at all.

I have therefore now modified the software at a fairly deep level to make it more flexible. The default is now that all people who are members of the forum will receive email notifications of each new Topic (i.e. a maximum of about 5 or 6 emails a month at current rates) but not of any subsequent replies. You can change the kind of notifications you get by going to User Control Panel --> Board Preferences --> Edit Post Notification Options, or by clicking the following link:

http://www.vallico.net/casino-forum/ucp ... boardwatch

There you can change things so that you get, e.g., notification of every submitted post, only the first post in a new topic, only posts in subscribed forums, only one notification between visits to the site, no notifications at all, etc. To be more specific, the options you are given are as follows, with the default asterisked:

Send me notice of all new topics, even where I am not subscribed to any forums:
Yes* / Yes, but only once between visits to the site / No

When I subscribe to a forum, send me notice of all new topics in the forum:
Yes* / Yes, but only once between visits to the forum

When I subscribe to a topic, send me notice of all posts in the topic:
Yes* / Yes, but only once between visits to the topic

If you wish to subscribe only to particular forums you need to click on any of our five defined forums ('General Announcements', 'The CASINO program', 'Quantum Monte Carlo', 'Computational Electronic Structure', and 'Jobs') and click the 'Subscribe Forum' button at the bottom of the screen (do this for each forum you want to subscribe to). You may unsubscribe at any time by going to User Control Panel --> Overview --> Manage Subscriptions. You can also subscribe to individual topics that interest you in order to follow the subsequent discussion.

I hope this is acceptable. If you don't like it, it's clearly sufficiently flexible that you can turn it off or change the behaviour to be the way you want in about one minute.

Best wishes,
Mike
Post Reply