posts via email?

[amol re]

Cant I "subscribe" to some selected forums of my interest and receive each post to any of those forums via email and reply via email?
I think it would be much more usable that way...I wont have to poll continuously...

[Thomas Paul]

That would be very cool. Unfortunately, it is not supported.

[Jim Yingst]

As Tom says the current software doesn't support it. But to discuss this as a possible feature for future enhancements: hmmm, I don't really like the idea. I think it would also change the character of the forums. If people receive an e-mail about a post and then reply to it, how do they know that there weren't already ten other replies saying the same thing? (I know, there are probably ten other e-mails in the in box - but people often process e-mail as they read it, and may read things out of order.) One could also put the e-mail in digests of some sort, grouped by forum and thread, but this would make te problem worse, IMO. Receiving e-mail notification of posts, including text of the post, sounds fine. But I think that the only way to reply should be be following a link to see the thread itself in its current state. Does that make sense, or is there some benefit to e-mail replies which I'm missing?

[Andrew Monkhouse]

I agree that email notification / response may not be desirable. I subscribe to a Linux email list which can be received in either digest (every 10 emails) or singular form. Due to it's very nature, I regularly see someone post a question, an answer will be sent in, then two or three hours later then same answer will be sent by a different person who simply hasnt received the first answer.
However I can also see the benefits of either an email notification or a newsgroup type subscription. In both cases, the posts would all be local rather than having to retrieve them from the server. This has several advantages:
[*]It could allow offline perusal of the lists.
[*]It could allow greater searching of postings.
[*]It could mean faster switching of topics (I have a 512k ADSL link here in Sydney, but even with that it is sometimes painfully slow getting a page from the States - just depends what else is happening somewhere between my box and the server).
Regards, Andrew

[Andrew Monkhouse]

Now can anyone tell me why sometimes putting bullet points in [ *] without a [ list] tag works, and sometimes it doesnt?
When it works, you get a "filled in" bullet point.

Sample.
If you use the [ list] option you get an "empty" bullet point.

sample

But it only sometimes works ... and sometimes it appears as above.
Regards, Andrew

[Jim Yingst]

Good points, Andrew. So do you think it would make sense to offer e-mail digests of posts, but only allow responses from the web page itself? Most of your bullet points - that is, attempted bullet points - seem to deal with reading posts, not responding.
List bullets - that's strange; I never noticed that. Probably because I never tried using the [*] outside a list; I just followed the instructions instead. Note that in your post, I don't see any "empty" bullet. The first is a filled-in round bullet; the second is a filled-in square. Looks the same in Mozilla, Opera, and IE. Do you still see something different?
The UBB code to parse submitted posts does some strange things sometimes. Sometimes it seems to depend on whether there's a space in front of a tag, or what other tags are also one the page, or the phase of the moon, or something else. :roll: I've made a few attempts to make sense of it, but with little luck.

[Andrew Monkhouse]

Hi Jim

So do you think it would make sense to offer e-mail digests of posts, but only allow responses from the web page itself?

Possibly .... but in this case I would like to see a link (or possibly links if it is a digest going out) in each email being sent out so that people can easily get back to the original thread and post to it if they so desired. This link would be one of the ubb=get_topic variety, not the ubb=reply variety so that people would have to see the full set of replies before they posted their reply.
Having said all that: I would have to admit that I probably wouldnt be one of the users of such a service: I post too frequently to be interested in getting responses in email and then going to the website to add my comments. Which I am sure someone somewhere must want

List bullets - that's strange .... I just followed the instructions

RTFM? But I am a programmer - I dont RTFM

Note that in your post, I don't see any "empty" bullet. The first is a filled-in round bullet; the second is a filled-in square. Looks the same in Mozilla, Opera, and IE. Do you still see something different?

Hmmm, Opera 6.0 on Redhat Linux 9 shows the first as a filled in round bullet and the second as a non filled in square. Mozilla 1.2.1 (or is it 5.0?) shows the first as a filled in round bullet and the second as a filled in square.
Regards, Andrew

[amol re]

What if the feature implementation is something like this...
1. For each new topic, send out emails to all the interested IDs
2. The email is not plain text or plain htmls..its a *intelligent* html which has got code in its "onload()". This code appends the new replies, if any since the last time the user read this email (or to keep it simple, every time, get all the posts and form the html)
3. the user can reply using email. the replyto email address and subject will be used by the server to determine where which forum which topic to add this post to.