Standardizing forum email notifications across Mediocre Laboratories

shawn shared some links said
16

One of the first things we built when we started Mediocre Laboratories was the forums you'll find over at https://mediocre.com/forum.

When you posted a comment or a reply to a mediocre.com forum topic, by default, we subscribed you to email notifications for future comments and replies. It was a lower trafficked forum than our meh.com forums have become and this behavior worked pretty well for us at the time.

We decided not to bring the subscription feature over to the meh.com forums when we launched. We feared it wouldn't be a good fit for the increased pace of comments during a midnight product launch. I think we made the correct choice there.

But we kept the subscription feature over at mediocre.com. And then we gave away free socks to our VMP members which prompted a fun discussion. And then we sent a bunch of emails to folks who weren't expecting it because the mediocre.com forums didn't work the same way the meh.com forums work. And then @WilhelmScreamer called us on it.

So we've made some changes to make forum notification emails work the same on mediocre.com and meh.com

  • @username mention notifications remain unchanged. They already worked consistently across mediocre.com and meh.com and are controlled by a setting on your https://mediocre.com/account page.
  • We've turned off the feature that automatically subscribed you to email notifications if you added a comment or reply to a topic on mediocre.com. You now have to opt-in to a topic's subscription-based notifications by clicking the "subscribe" link.
  • We've added the subscription-based notification feature to meh.com. Again, you have to opt-in to a topic's subscription-based notifications by clicking the "subscribe" link.
  • You can unsubscribe to subscription-based notification emails by clicking the unsubscribe link on the topic, but there's also a link in the footer of the email itself if you decide you're getting too many emails for a particular topic.
  • Just like mention-based notification emails, subscription-based notification emails are delayed for 10 minutes to allow the original poster a window to make edits. If you happen to view the topic on the website during that window we assume you've read the comment/reply and won't send you a subscription based notification.

Hope this helps.