Email Alerts : Opinions wanted

[Jools]

All~

So, if you could subscribe for email alerts, would you like this and would what would you like to be notified of? I am looking for your overall views and suggestions for events that would trigger emails to you. Some examples I've been thinking of.

Email me when data changes on a fish I am keeping
Email me when a picture changes on a fish I am keeping
Email me when an image is added of mine
Email me when a species I am watching is changed (data)
Email me when a species, genus or family I am watching has new pics
Email me a weekly digets of new pics
Email me when someone keeps a fish I am keeping
Email me when someone changes a "my aquaria" I am watching

Jools

[Silurus]

Email me when a new article goes up (CotM, book review or otherwise).

[Marc van Arc]

Thanks for offering these services, but you don't have to alert me for anything. I'll see for myself.

[MatsP]

Thanks for offering these services, but you don't have to alert me for anything. I'll see for myself.

Same here...

--
Mats

[Jools]

OK, but you guys are mods. What about less frequent visitors?

Ones that I will be introducing are my cats and my aquaria ones. This is where an entry has not been changed for a period of time. It will automaticlaly cull data that has been deserted.

Jools

[MatsP]

OK, but you guys are mods. What about less frequent visitors?

[Flippant]Perhaps they haven't seen the post yet - after all, it's only been up for 5 hours[/flippant].

Sure, I agree there are people [including SOME of the mods] that don't visit very often.

By the way, I just spotted:
Email me when an image is added of mine
Would this mean that we no longer have to write e-mail to the originator of the image? That would be great.

--
Mats

[Jools]

I liked the flippant tags! Good point - these ideas should be a slow cooked (as opposed to half baked) anyway.

Would this mean that we no longer have to write e-mail to the originator of the image? That would be great.

Yes, but would only work where the contributor was a registered user and thus we have an email address for them. I'm minded to point out the personal touch is also lost. Not sure how much that counts for.

Jools

[MatsP]

I liked the flippant tags! Good point - these ideas should be a slow cooked (as opposed to half baked) anyway.

It just sort of resembled the typical newbie saying something, and then a few hours later saying "why hasn't anyone commented on it" - if me, Marc and a few others don't find it necessary/meaningful/within-our-knowledge to comment, then it may take a day or two before someone who actually has something to say on the subject comes around.

And yes, taking the time to get things right is often worth it...

Would this mean that we no longer have to write e-mail to the originator of the image? That would be great.

Yes, but would only work where the contributor was a registered user and thus we have an email address for them. I'm minded to point out the personal touch is also lost. Not sure how much that counts for.

Jools

The personal touch is sometimes useful. And clearly, if there is a difference between "registered users" and "other contributors", then I would think that it must be made clear that there is a difference. I would have thought that as long as we have an e-mail address for the contributor, we should be able to auto-mail them, no matter of whether they are registered users or not [but perhaps with an option for the picture adder to "do not send an e-mail, I will send one manually"?]

The other part is that there probably should be a a bit of batching going on - it could be very annoying for someone like JJ or Mark Smith to receive a single mail for every photo added - I usually batch them up on a "per day" basis (or per-mail, depending on what makes most sense).

--
Mats

[L number Banana]

Email me when a new article goes up (CotM, book review or otherwise).
Email me when data changes on a fish I am keeping

[CanadaPleco]

LOVE LOVE LOVE email notifications, just have an option to turn them off for those that don't want it.

[andywoolloo]

i mostly check for new stuff every day on my own.

and I also I get twitter updates when new stuff comes up. Which is way cool!

[Bas Pels]

All~

So, if you could subscribe for email alerts, would you like this and would what would you like to be notified of? I am looking for your overall views and suggestions for events that would trigger emails to you. Some examples I've been thinking of.

Email me when data changes on a fish I am keeping
Email me when a picture changes on a fish I am keeping
Email me when an image is added of mine
Email me when a species I am watching is changed (data)
Email me when a species, genus or family I am watching has new pics
Email me a weekly digets of new pics
Email me when someone keeps a fish I am keeping
Email me when someone changes a "my aquaria" I am watching

Jools

If I could click them ojn, I would not do so - but I would not subscribe to any follow up.

If I want to know something I'll find it, and if I'm not looking, apparently I don't want to know

New names, and so on will, I would assume be discussed in the forum

[krazyGeoff]

Hi,
I think that Email me about "whatever it is that I have demonstrated an interst in" is a good thing.
I may be just looking for one thing, for example, or not have the time to come here every day.

So emails about what I am interested in may in fact bring me back for frequently (If I didn't come here often). It may show there is extra interest in what I am specifically interested in etc. etc.

Auto emails when my contributions are made is a good idea. This is one of the things that is a tricky balance between "the personal touch", and the Mods just being really busy. A bulk contributor would perhaps have this option de-selected, and thus be getting the personal touch.

I like your thinking Jools, and yet it is a balance between effort to implement and maintain functionality vs. frequency of use.

I mean in the areas I visit there are 10-15 folks that are regular contributors, but there must be heaps of folks that just do "window shopping". This sort of functionality may lead to a wider engagement.

oh crap, now I really do sound like a manager

Geoff

[DJ-don]

Email me when a new article goes up (CotM, book review or otherwise).

i agree with this one. maybe you can give options on which type of articles you want to see?

[Jools]

and I also I get twitter updates when new stuff comes up. Which is way cool!

Yes, that's the RSS feeds, I could also look at including articles on there too.

Jools

[Jools]

Just wanted to breath new life into this. We've now got a lot of My Cats and My Aquaria data that hasn't been edited in a long time. At the very least I think we should add the emailing of users to ask them to review or update. Just a click on a link, minimal effort.

Martin S or Mats, this (within a CRON style daily framework for sending emails) would be a good mini coding project!

Jools

[MatsP]

I'd be happy to work on this sort of thing. What language would this be - do you have php cron jobs, or use something else?

--
Mats

[Jools]

Yes, php cron jobs. Martin also asked about this and I think I will put out a description of one and see where it gets us. My Cats is the logical starting place but I'd like to build this as a framework type thing as I think there will be loads of these.

Can somebody check my logic?

Tasks are:
Add a update_reminder_sent date to the database (Jools to do at the request of author) default to 0.

Write PHP (inc. mysql) to identify a batch of (10 a day to begin with, but parameter driven?) My Cats records where the date last edited is zero or more than a year ago and a "update_reminder_sent" date is zero. More thought to go into this I think as I (and other major users of the thing) will not want 30 emails. Maybe limit to one aquaria or a max. of 3 emails or some clever mechanism to not email that user for at least a further week (might need a new field on the contributors table).

Draft an email template (html) to explain to the My Cats user that they've added a species and not touched it for a year. Could they click on the link to get to a landing page that will "revalidate" their data for a further year.

Write a landing page (This is a classic Jools could do it in 20 minutes, but becuase it would take in-depth knowledge of the guts of My Cats, anyone else would be hours or more at it. So best me to do).

Write PHP (inc. mysql) to identify reminders sent but not responded to a 28 days after sent and set the "stopped keeping" date to the current date but not removing ("remove date") or deleting that data. 28 days as people go on holiday, or are otherwise offline for short times etc. Send email to user confirming the data change and cc admin(s).

Write an announcement on the thing (which can also be referenced by the notification email) in the forum.

In development, I think there are three phases.

1) Get it working and emailing the working group daily with the results.
2) Get the email text in place but still send to the working group.
3) Put it in the wild, monitor results for 3 months.

Thoughts?

Jools

[Martin S]

Jools

We could send one email per person, but each email would contain data for all their tanks.

So, do a query to get the list of names of users whose tank(s) have met the required conditions, and for each person, do another query of all their aquaria and generate the text for each one, and then send the completed text to the person.
Having done something similar in C#, I'm just not sure if the email sending/generating text elements of the process are as easy?

Martin

[MatsP]

Clearly a case of "great minds think alike", because I was thinking "One e-mail with links all necessary information".

I think you should allow at least two "warnings" before making it "no longer kept" as well.

--
Mats

[Sam]

Email me when data changes on a fish I am keeping
Email me when a picture changes on a fish I am keeping
Email me when an image is added of mine
Email me when a species I am watching is changed (data)
Email me when a species, genus or family I am watching has new pics
Email me a weekly digets of new pics
Email me when someone keeps a fish I am keeping
Email me when someone changes a "my aquaria" I am watching
yes please

[Jools]

Email me when data changes on a fish I am keeping
Email me when a picture changes on a fish I am keeping
Email me when an image is added of mine
Email me when a species I am watching is changed (data)
Email me when a species, genus or family I am watching has new pics
Email me a weekly digets of new pics
Email me when someone keeps a fish I am keeping
Email me when someone changes a "my aquaria" I am watching
yes please

Yeah, that's where my mind is too. This is the kind of thing I have planned.

Jools

[Sam]

You know it makes sense and thanks is most definitely in order

[MatsP]

Sam, as Jools said, this is in the plans. It's only me and Jools doing the programming for the site, and only in our spare time. It means that progress isn't always very fast. I submitted a change a few days ago that made hundreds of small changes to the my aquaria, my cats and my blogs. You probably won't see much of a difference, since the MAIN point of those changes is to allow names that have funny characters (such as &, %, ' or ") in the name. It's clearly not a highly visible point, but it doesn't work correctly if you view the data for such a user.

The most important part of my job on Planet Catfish is to make sure things aren't broken. Adding new things is good, but if you have broken things, they should be fixed first.

--
Mats

[MatsP]

Seeing as the only bug that I isn't fixed is the one about stars by the name, which I don't think I can fix, I'm going to draw up a little sketch of what we need here.

--
Mats

[Jools]

So, dropping into the technicalities, let's have a go at email when my cats is untouched for a year.

This uses the two stage process of (a) log the required notification in the new table (action Jools to create) and (b) start thinking about an email engine reusing the forum templating and email sending system?

I think this thread will go techie for a while and then once the engine has been built, we will come back to the topics of useful notifications.

Cheers,

Jools

[Jools]

So, this is now off the drawing board and now into beta production. This should go live by the end of this week.

Initially there are two email notification streams.

1) Email thanking you for an image submitted once it's been added (because it can be days, weeks months and sometimes over a year between sending me a picture and it going online).

2) Email notifying you of My Cats data which has not been touched in over a year.

More planned and they will be in this announcement.

Jools