Email Announcements

[Enrico Ng]

How do I get new announcements emailed to me?
I remember reading somewhere that if I "subscribe" to the forum, then I will get email, but I have received nothing.

I dont check the forum often so I usually dont know whats going on when a machine goes down or when a change has been made in policy.

[jkeller]

It's something that a lot of people -- including me! -- have been hoping to have available. Apparently, there's a bug in vBulletin that allows you to sign up but not get any notices. A pain, I know.

Until it's fixed, the easiest thing is to look at the "v" indicator next to the name on the front page. It'll be yellow if there are any new posts in that forum.

[Enrico Ng]

oh, I remember when this board was first created, there was a message telling us all to subscribe so we get emails.

The problem is that I dont check this forum very often.

I dont really think it would be that hard to write a tiny little script to email people updates automatically.

I was looking that the CP page, and there is a place for me to update my email. it says it is for system specific updates, but I havent received any.

[jkeller]

Originally posted by Enrico Ng
I was looking that the CP page, and there is a place for me to update my email. it says it is for system specific updates, but I havent received any.

Again, one of those things that don't seem to be used yet. This CPanel option is brand-new, so it's possible that aletia doesn't have the back-end portion set up. But I know that it would have helped a lot if people had gotten messages these last couple of weeks.

[Julian Muñoz]

Regarding the problem with vBulletin, it's not a bug. That's the way vBulletin works.

When you subscribe to a thread, you will get an email whenever the thread is updated.

But when you subscribe to a forum, you will not get email updates. You will only have that forum in your User CP for easy access.

I guess there should be a hack to receive emails updates when a thread is posted on a forum, but I'm sure aletia won't install it.

[jkeller]

Originally posted by JulianD
Regarding the problem with vBulletin, it's not a bug. That's the way vBulletin works.

Ah! Sorry, my mistake. I'd thought it was supposed to work the same as for threads from the feed back I'd seen before.

Well, there's always the e-mail addresses entered through CPanel. Hopefully, Aletia will do active announcements with those in the future.

[EHG]

I'm not quite sure what I did when I signed up but whenever I reply to any thread in any forum here I receive an email of any subsequent replys to that thread. Apparently by making a response I am subscribing to the thread ??

I even set up a seperate email box for them called aletiamb and being somewhat prolific responder the box is stuffed daily with email. The email does contain a handy link which takes you immediately to that response on the thread.

I think perhaps this is the best way to handle the subscriptions?? I know that I wouldn't want to get probably hundreds of emails from the posting of everythread and everyresponse in a particular forum although it might be nice to be able to subscribe easily to a particular thread without having to post to it - that would keep the lurkers happy. Then again perhaps there is a way to do that not sure.

[Julian Muñoz]

EHG: It's an option in vBulletin. It's checked by default when you reply to a thread.

Here's how to disable it by default:

Go to your User CP > Edit Options > Use 'Email Notification' by default? > NO.


THis will turn off Email Notification by default, when you reply to a thread.

But if you are interested in a thread, you can check the box 'Email Notification' and you will receive notifications when the thread is updated.

[sillyalien]

If that doesn't work, Aletiaforums may have that option disabled. So y'all come back real soon now y'hear.

[EHG]

Thanks JulianD - I kind of like the default and like to follow the threads that I respond to. Matter of fact it was the link in the email that brought me back to this thread with a mere click of my trackball (I dislike mouse's immensely but that's material for another thead)!

[sillyalien]

Originally posted by EHG
Matter of fact it was the link in the email that brought me back to this thread ...

Well that settles it then. It works.

[jkeller]

Originally posted by SillyAlien
Well that settles it then. It works.

Never a question for me; it's how I keep up with all my threads, too.

What Enrico Ng was posting about was forum-level notifications. That is, an e-mail sent out whenever a new thread (one you've never read) is created. He and I (and many others, I know) misunderstood the meaning of "subscription".

vBulletin made the unfortunate choice to label it the same as the option to subscribe to a thread. Instead, as JulianD pointed out, it just places a bookmark in your forum "user cp" home page. None too useful, since you can access the forum just as fast from the Aletia Forums home page.

I'll keep crossing my fingers for mailings to start rolling in to the address that I set in my CPanel for cobra...

[Enrico Ng]

I'm not specifically concerned with being about to receive email updates for forums.

I just want to receive announcements via email

I doubt it would be that hard to write some sort of script to post to the board and send email to a list.

or, I doubt it is really that much work for the poster to write a message to the board, and email the same message to a email list.

I just want to know when the system is going down.
I dont want to have to check this board every day

[EHG]

Originally posted by Enrico Ng

I just want to know when the system is going down.
I dont want to have to check this board every day

Some rather interesting presumtions in that statement.

1. That person or persons actually can predict when one or more of their usually misbehaving grey boxes is going to attempt suicide.

2. That even if they were able to predict with any kind of reasonable accuracy when their various combinations of silicone and plastic were entering a hopefully temporary stasis, that they would have the time to email their clientele of said condition.

3. That said person or persons would give a damn if they did have the time to email their clientele and do so.

Under normal circumstances one would presume that there would be regularly scheduled maintenance for each server and those hours would be predictable and posted somewhere. However it seems that they have their hands full attempting to reinvigorate these servers when they take their own rest periods and call time out.

If one looks in the Aletia announcement forum there have been a total of 5 messages since April 17th notifying those that are interested of Machine reboots or in one case (tiger) that the machine was down.

If that is the actual record of downtime I would say that is an exemplary record!! However after reading some of the threads on the other forums and then looking at the UP time on the various servers - it would seen that there is a rather large discrepency between the reported outages and the actual amount of times machines were taken down for maintenance or a reboot or more extensive maintence.

Personally I havn't had many problems out of Eagle which has supposedly been up for 17 days now. Not bad for a machine that has 1gb of system memory and has used about a trillion times that and still reports that it has a a few hundred million more mb of ram left then it started out with!



I kind of look at it like this for 8 bucks a month I HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO COMPLAINTS!! KEEP ON TRUCKEN ALETIA!! :wavey:

[Enrico Ng]

well, when I say system going down, I ofcourse was refering to scheduled downtimes or annoucements about problems that they know about.

As for them having the time or caring about emailing people, Since it is just as easy to email to a list as it is to post a message, I do not see the problem.
Its just a matter of if the people running this place care.

And, like you said, they are not that many annoucements, so it should not be that hard for the them to email to a email list too.