feeds versus email (notification)

ichigo

moe said: @ichigo we could start a whole new thread on that subject, i have a pretty strong opinion on that. :) i don't want to get too far offtopic, so let me just make a few short points (further discussion maybe really in another thread or by e-mail?): - rss/atom, despite being "the best we have now" is broken by design. "push" is not supposed to work that way. everytime you query the feed a little forum server suffers. - less tech-savvy users don't even know what rss or atom is and will just *shrug* - all feed-aggregators work differently. many will not let you comfortably monitor individual threads inside one big feed by design (i use rawdog and i like it). - i don't want to pull up $rssreader and subscribe/setup a filter-rule everytime i post to a thread on forum x or y. a simple "notify me"-checkbox is less hassle. - e-mail is really convinient (i can just file all notifies into a folder and process later) ok, this got longer than i wanted. apologize :)

ichigo

@moe: * well i dont think that the little servers will suffer that much..because if the server is set up correctly it will send a header telling that nothing has changed since last pull and everything will be just fine (please correct me if im talking bs) * less tech-savvy users have a problem with it ... thats true...and i totally agree ... there arent that much "otto normal" users who even know about feed aggregators / news readers... thats a sad fact * in a good feed implementation you shouldnt need to set up a filter rule (if i understood correctly) * and yes email is getting better with things like smart folders and tagging / labeling like in osx mail and gmail :D so i have to admit you won at the point that email is more widely used....but i would love to see vanilla as a forum that is unconventional....and we (yes we all) really have to promote the usefulness of feeds....so that everyone knows about them and uses them someday like everybody is surfing and googling right now

moe

as this thread gets longer i just realized another thing that i'd like to see in the core, *cough*, i mean as "default-extension"
that would be: quoting!

i'll do it manually for now (the "slashdot-way").

* well i dont think that the little servers will suffer that much..because if the server is set up correctly it will send a header telling that nothing has changed since last pull and everything will be just fine (please correct me if im talking bs)

you are right that the request/response are small but it's still a hit on the server.
and a thousand users (maybe not too far fetched for a large forum?) all having their RSS-digester misconfigured to "check for updates every two nanoseconds"
can cause quite some headache there...

* in a good feed implementation you shouldnt need to set up a filter rule (if i understood correctly)

well, depends on the reader, too, i guess.
generally a lot of bandwidth is wasted (i don't want to see all threads, just mine) and i have to do whatever is necessary to have this one thread somehow stand out so I notice when something happens. too much work (you can tell by now how lazy i am;)).

but i would love to see vanilla as a forum that is unconventional....and we (yes we all) really have to promote the usefulness of feeds

well, i like that approach.
but i think we shouldn't drop proven and useful feats just for the sake of being different. imho people will just naturally gravitate to "what works best" anyways.

vanilla is already unconventional (to me) as in that many things that others did wrong were done right. without having even looked at the code i can tell that the people who designed it do have a clue (ok it's php, but hey, even php can be done right i was told )

i do very much appreciate the attitude of thouroughly discussing feat requests instead of just slapping bloat over bloat like so many other projects do.

so i have good faith that most of the little things still missing right now will be added one way or another (be it extension or core) eventually. i'm patient enough to wait until the good stuff has trickled in while the bad stuff is weeded out.

so, ok now let's see whether i missed a </i> somewhere.
ah! hehe, where's that preview extension again? )

ichigo

yeah quoting was something i did look for too :D and yeah i think the compromise would be good (extention on by default) edit: and thanks for your insights on that topic (i didnt think about the serverload...youre right...a forum is likely to get a lot of users)