Persistent Alerts [Paid] 1.3.1

[Daniel Hood]

Daniel Hood submitted a new resource:

Persistent Alerts - Keep users informed by delivering alerts/emails based on user preferences regardless of activity

This add-on enables you to keep alerting users of responses to threads regardless of the last time they viewed the thread. By default XenForo alerts users of a new reply to a thread they're watching only if they've viewed the thread since the last alert. This reduces redundancy. However, sometimes it'd be nice if users could continue to receive emails and alerts of new replies even if they didn't view the thread since the last one.

Admin Panel
This feature can be enabled either:...

Read more about this resource...

 

[kontrabass]

Wow, I'm going to be using like... all of your add-ons. Haha. Very excited to give this one a go. Users have complained about "missing alerts" from day 1. Nice to see a user pref too.

 

[The Dark Wizard]

Daniel Hood submitted a new resource:

Persistent Alerts - Keep users informed by delivering alerts/emails based on user preferences regardless of activity



Read more about this resource...

So.......this seems to be something I'll be getting later tonight to finally stop the whole "The site is broken, I'm not getting any alerts" thing since users never really understand the fact taht alerts only come after you visit a thread after your last alert.

Question can I make it so that its persistent alerts only? Not interested in raising email costs any more then they are, so If I can optionally leave those like normal so it doesn't generate more, that would be great.

 

[Daniel Hood]

Wow, I'm going to be using like... all of your add-ons. Haha. Very excited to give this one a go. Users have complained about "missing alerts" from day 1. Nice to see a user pref too.

So.......this seems to be something I'll be getting later tonight to finally stop the whole "The site is broken, I'm not getting any alerts" thing since users never really understand the fact taht alerts only come after you visit a thread after your last alert.

Awesome. Glad to see people like it.

Question can I make it so that its persistent alerts only? Not interested in raising email costs any more then they are, so If I can optionally leave those like normal so it doesn't generate more, that would be great.

That's not currently possible but I can see the use for it (though it's the exact opposite of why @MattW wanted it lol).

 

[The Dark Wizard]

That's not currently possible but I can see the use for it (though it's the exact opposite of why @MattW wanted it lol).

Glad I could get the update funded though !

@MattW

Thanks for originally having the idea to fund this......I can't believe I didn't think of it lol.

 

[Daniel Hood]

Daniel Hood updated Persistent Alerts with a new update entry:

1.1.0

What's New:

• Introduced the option to suppress persistent emailing. If the suppress option is enabled, your users will only receive one email (until they read the thread) like XenForo normally does by default but will continue to get "alerts".

Read the rest of this update entry...

This feature was sponsored by @The Dark Wizard.

 

[arn]

Daniel, love that this add on exists as it addresses a big issue. But, I fear it would cause tons of emails for busy threads. Still, glad this exists.

Could you consider a more subtle solution where if the email is read, a tracking image notifies the server that the user can then get more emails? If they don't read the email, then it stops at one. If they open it, they get more.

arn

 

[m1ne]

Daniel, love that this add on exists as it addresses a big issue. But, I fear it would cause tons of emails for busy threads. Still, glad this exists.

Could you consider a more subtle solution where if the email is read, a tracking image notifies the server that the user can then get more emails? If they don't read the email, then it stops at one. If they open it, they get more.

arn

Does the above update not suffice?

Introduced the option to suppress persistent emailing. If the suppress option is enabled, your users will only receive one email (until they read the thread)

It's slightly different but the result is the same.
A question from me too, Daniel.. could there be an option to set maximum number of alerts? I assume if I receive 100 replies to my thread whilst I'm away, I'll have 100 alerts? Definitely not ideal. This option would get my money.

 

[arn]

It's slightly different but the result is the same.

That's what the default Xenforo behavior is now. But the problem is that people read the email, never visit the thread, and never get another email again. It doesn't seem intuitive.

arn

 

[Daniel Hood]

Could you consider a more subtle solution where if the email is read, a tracking image notifies the server that the user can then get more emails? If they don't read the email, then it stops at one. If they open it, they get more.

This is interesting and I see the benefits but it is a more complicated task and I'd have to look into how to do it optimally to avoid scalability concerns.

A question from me too, Daniel.. could there be an option to set maximum number of alerts? I assume if I receive 100 replies to my thread whilst I'm away, I'll have 100 alerts? Definitely not ideal. This option would get my money.

That's how it would work. The reason I don't like the idea of setting the max number of alerts is due to the fact that a benefit of this is that you can keep watching a thread without having to read every reply. For example, I may not care that "User A" responds to a site announcement but I'm absolutely curious if an admin does. So any time an alert gets triggered, I'd just hover over the alert to read it, see it's a user I don't care about, and continue on knowing that I'll get the alert next time. With your method, I'd only be able to do that x times and then it'd just stop with no warning or rationale. It's possible to say "check the alert status to see if it's read or not" but that's not optimal because I'd have to query each user's count separately and the watch/alert process can already be a slow task (i.e. future fix bug reports). Aside from the potential confusion of the end user, I have scalability concerns about a feature like this.

 

[Xon]

Alerts are very easy to get wrong on the performance front if care isn't taken.

 

[kontrabass]

Would it be possible to get a sub-option of "Persistent Alert - User Option", that would allow admin selection of "user option default ON" and "default OFF"? I want to allow user selection but would prefer to default everyone to ON...

 

[Daniel Hood]

Would it be possible to get a sub-option of "Persistent Alert - User Option", that would allow admin selection of "user option default ON" and "default OFF"? I want to allow user selection but would prefer to default everyone to ON...

https://xenforo.com/community/resources/persistent-alerts.4962/field?field=faq

 

[kontrabass]

Well Daniel, the add-on works great! But for us, it generates just too many alerts. I guess we're blessed to have a lot of traffic @arn this would be an issue for you as well it seems. When we tested for 24 hours, users were swamped with 50, 60... some 80 alerts after 12 hours of not logging in (we have emails surpressed thankfully). With that many alerts, they found it difficult to find any one alert they were looking out for.

I feel that this will work great on less-trafficked boards as is. For big boards, IMO we need Facebook-style alerts. For example instead of 30 alerts for replies to one busy thread, one alert would read "Joe Doe and 29 others replied to the thread "blah blah"

 

[Daniel Hood]

I'm sorry that your board can't benefit it. Might be worthwhile to enable it on just specific nodes? Since it's not benefiting your community, I'd be ok with giving you a refund if you want.

 

[kontrabass]

I'm sorry that your board can't benefit it. Might be worthwhile to enable it on just specific nodes? Since it's not benefiting your community, I'd be ok with giving you a refund if you want.

It looks like bd alerts addon may be useful as it has an option to group alerts together. I'll do some testing.

 

[empire]

@kontrabass If you have both, does bd Alerts work with this one to group the persistent alerts together?

 

[SEOmers]

Just brought as a test. I'll feed back in a few days, see if anyone notices on my site etc

I'm hoping people wont but will start to notice that missed threads, have more interaction!

Just feedback though - I haven't had any emails from your site about licences etc


Also - Is there a way to turn this on for old members? I have turned it on via options ACP but I've gone to my own profile and still had to turn it on so if there is a way to turn it on for everyone who's already a member?

 

[Daniel Hood]

Also - Is there a way to turn this on for old members? I have turned it on via options ACP but I've gone to my own profile and still had to turn it on so if there is a way to turn it on for everyone who's already a member?

Yes, run the query on this page: https://xenforo.com/community/resources/persistent-alerts.4962/field?field=faq and all of your users will be opted in.

Just feedback though - I haven't had any emails from your site about licences etc

Odd. Thanks for letting me know. Can you check your spam and everything?

 

[SEOmers]

Odd. Thanks for letting me know. Can you check your spam and everything?

112% not come in inbox or junk. I'm not fussed as I've used your site before, just feedback

I'll try your other suggestion as well.