Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.

Wishlist - subscription to threads

w1rebaby

17:31 / 29.09.02

This may have come up before, but I'd like to see an option to subscribe to threads, i.e. receive an email whenever someone posts on a particular thread.

Technically, it's pretty easy but I can see there might be objections in terms of, it encourages people not to look at forums as a whole and engage in new discussion but just to stick to certain topics. I've considered that, but at any one time, in Head Shop for example there are only a few topics that I'm really into, and while I may surf a few others sometimes I don't very often. I just check the ones that I'm interested in seeing the responses to. A subscription option would save bandwidth and would not, personally speaking, reduce the amount that I do a general check to see whether there's anything that I'm interested in.

Either way I think it's worth a trial. Most of the modern BB software has it built in and it's generally met with approval.

Tom Coates

20:38 / 29.09.02

My personal opinion is that it's a very good way of keeping up with what's going on in one very narrow thread and utterly appalling at fostering any sense of effective online community. That's precisely why it wasn't incorporated in the first rebuild of the site. I may be wrong, so I'll think about it more seriously, but generally I'm fairly anti it...

bio k9

09:26 / 30.09.02

How about we bring back the view recent posts option? So I can shut up about it, if nothing else.

Our Lady of The Two Towers

12:01 / 30.09.02

I can't see what the point of this is really? Surely on a popular thread you could get a dozen e-mails in the space of an hour to tell you someone has posted something new...

Morlock - groupie for hire

13:05 / 30.09.02

Hmmm, see if this flies. How about a tick-box on the Reply page, which sets a trip-wire kinda thing. If set, the first post after yours (and only the first) triggers an e-mail.

This would allow you to keep better tabs on threads you're actively involved in without narrowing your involvement with the rest of the board much. If you're waiting for someone to respond to your last post, you can get a warning when they do, the rest of the thread status you have to find the old-fashioned way.

Of course (assuming this is even possible) there's the risk that people will add empty posts just to set the tripwire, but I think we can show some restraint there.

w1rebaby

14:01 / 30.09.02

In general, with software like vbulletin, it emails you once to let you know someone has replied and then doesn't after that until you come back and visit the thread, so you don't get flooded.

It's obviously up to you, Tom, but I'm just saying I'd like to see it.

ONLY NICE THINGS

14:19 / 30.09.02

Have to say, I'm anti. Barbelith is meant to be one of the more intelligent and distributed boards, and I think that having people paying attention to topic areas rather than just popping into threads when they are notified that somebody may have disagreed with them would impoverish that.

View recent posts is probably better, because you are getting a range of threads thrown up...

Our Lady of The Two Towers

14:32 / 30.09.02

The Haus is wise. Trust the Haus.

I think his suggestion makes more sense.

Matthew Fluxington

15:43 / 30.09.02

I think one of the best things that View Recent Posts/Today's Active Topics has to recommmend it is that it does give you little tastes of threads that you might not otherwise look at. If that function is to return, I strongly suggest that it includes some text from the most recent post as the old version did.

I agree with Haus and Tom about email updates on specific threads. That's just lazy and antisocial, I think.

w1rebaby

18:50 / 30.09.02

Actually, letting my antisocial nature overcome my laziness here, I think View Recent Posts is worse than email updates. The reason being, with updates (a) you have to go through the forums in the first place to subscribe to a topic, and (b) after a while you stop getting updates, so you have to go through the forums again.

View Recent Posts means you get to see a number of topics which are new to you, which makes you think you're checking the whole board, but in fact you're not - you're just led by popularity, and you may well miss something profound that has just fallen off the bottom by accident. That's a problem with having most recent posts at the top in the forums. It's balanced by the "natural selection" idea, as long as topics are well distributed across forums, so I'm not complaining about that - but View Recent Posts I think loses that balance. I've tried using the VRP option on some boards and I found I was missing far too much.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

21:57 / 30.09.02

Personally, I tend to trawl threads until I find new stuff- meaning I end up reading threads I may well not have otherwise. The idea is nice, but I think it would encourage laziness. And in my case, I have enough of that already.

Matthew Fluxington

11:45 / 01.10.02

...if you only look at View Recent Posts, I guess yr right. But in moderation, it's like a "random" button.

Persephone

12:36 / 01.10.02

Re: View Recent Posts, that was the feature that I missed most of all from the red board. But lately I've been noticing that its absence has changed the --ergh, not the tenor-- the time signature (?) of the board; that is, more threads stretch out over days now. Before I slightly felt that it was a faux pas to drag back a thread from the day before and certainly I had a conscious strategy for not posting right before 6 PM (which is when the page flipped over to the next day for me.)

I mean, it's really cool... how a slight change of the interface changes the organism.

Goodness Gracious Meme

15:03 / 02.10.02

That's interesting, Persephone... I'd be dubious about email updates, partly cause it could get pretty unmanageable, and partly for the reasons others have given. I think being encouraged to read broadly across the board is useful, and is important if you are trying to encourage a community sensibility. And in the event of people getting into shitflinging (round here? nooooo), it could act to funnel people towards these threads and allow them to unbalance the board's activity even more than they do now...

The last topics feature might be useful, and perhaps by now, people are used enough to digging up old topics if they want to for it not to effect this in the way the persephone has described...

bio k9

18:38 / 02.10.02

Um, I just want to be able to go into my user profile and view MY recent posts.

Lionheart

18:19 / 10.10.02

So we can't have the "suscribe to threads" feasture because a few people don't like it? So we're al gonna be denied that option because a group of people don't think they'll need it?

I come to the board a few times each week. You expect me to go through ALL the forums, through ALL the threads, to read ALL the posts to see in which ones I've posted and if anybody replied to my posts?

ONLY NICE THINGS

22:02 / 10.10.02

Yes, Lionheart. Because nobody cares about you. Nobody gives a damn about you. Nobody gives even an iota of fuck about whether you have to struggle and toil to remember where you have posted, or indeed if you are interested in whether people have responded to your posts.

In fact, Barbelith has been designed, redesigned and refined specifically to PISS YOU OFF.

Well, the secret's out.

Or, to return to Planet Actual for a second, at the moment this functionality does not exist. A convincing case must be made for the board to undergo a change that will alter the way people interact with it. It seems that at present this case has not been made yet. Is all.

We're The Great Old Ones Now

09:57 / 11.10.02

Lionheart, the truth is that you're not going to get this function because Tom hates it in ways I can't begin to describe. He is inventing new words for how much he hates it. His voice trembles like a post-orgasmic amateur opera singer when he tries to use standard English to express his contempt for the neurons in his own body which are devoted to acknowledging the existence of this idea. His energies are directed towards generating a global hegemony of Tomness for the pure and unique purpose of expunging from the human genome the DNA which sponsors this concept. When he has done that, he will retire into his desert fortress and design superbeings who have only two goals: sexually satisfying him and his friends in new and soul-shaking ways, and militantly and violently seeking out any mutations to the genome which throw this possibility back into the world.

In short, this is Barbelith's only utterly pointless thread. Live with it.

Tom Coates

18:16 / 11.10.02

I'm not planning to add features to the board which have the consequence of trivialising the kind of interactions with the board that I think people should HAVE to make if they're going to be a member of the community rather than someone who ducks in and out to catch stuff they find particularly interesting. I have a very different vision of community from a lot of people I know - I believe that the COMMUNITY aspect is fundamental, and speed of use is secondary. It's like in the real world - if you could get all the benefits of community without putting in any of the work then you would, whether or not that in some way impoverished the sense of the community or other people's interactions...

Much of this stuff has been really valuable though. It's definitely still my intention to reintroduce some kind of thread-tracking functionality...

Jack Fear

18:46 / 11.10.02

I applaud your diplomacy, Tom.

Others (and you know who you are): KNOW MY WRATH!!! AAAAARRRRRRRRHHHH!!

Our Lady of The Two Towers

15:14 / 12.10.02

Lionheart- If you are going to insist on maintaining a life away from Barbelith then know that we will scorn and hate you with all our might. Leave your wheatfields and workstations, come and join us in the warming glow of Barbelith's warming glow. Then you'll miss nothing and never feel empty again...

We're The Great Old Ones Now

08:46 / 13.10.02

See? I am not the sensible one! I am the furious, passionate one who doesn't even wear a jumper unless he wants to!

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

11:17 / 13.10.02

Lada- you mean there IS life beyond Barbelith?

God, no wonder all my friends are scared about my mental health.

We're The Great Old Ones Now

13:59 / 13.10.02

You have friends? Aren't they those pointy things with the little wheels? Or is that Scalextric?

Lionheart

02:04 / 15.10.02

I have more friends than all of you put together!

Problem is they're all in my head BUT THAT'S NOT IMPORTANT!

I'M RIGHT! YOU'RE WRONG!

What's Column 2? Can we put something there?

We're The Great Old Ones Now

12:40 / 23.10.02

Column two is where the Inner Sanctum Members can see your Shoggoth Score. Once we've raised it to five stars, you are considered ready for blending with one of the Lizard Children. If it gets as high as eight, you may start to feel the Blood Change. By ten, you're one of us.

It's just a handy method of keeping track of who's been made into an alien brain-eating reptile God.

Add Your Reply