Enhancement Request

[Imar]

Hi everyone,

Would it be possible to somehow mark the e-mail messages that a poster participated in?
I get a lot of messages in my inbox, and it would be really useful to see in which threads I participated, so I can focus on those, and safely ignore the others when I don't have the time to read them.

A marker in the subject or body text would then allow me to set up a filter in my e-mail program.

I realize it may be tricky to do, but IMHO it would be a useful addition.

Cheers,

Imar


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Imar Spaanjaars
Everyone is unique, except for me.

[planoie]

I second this request. I have the Snitz forums code and if I get the chance I can probably take a look and figure out what needs to be added and where to put it.

Peter
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Work smarter, not harder.

[bluckcuck]

This is a good idea. So good in fact that I have already implemented it. :D

Now subscription emails will have the message "You have been a participant in this discussion." if you have posted a reply (or started the topic).


planoie -

Thanks for the offer of help with Snitz however the subscriptions processing is one area that we've completely rewritten and doesn't share any original Snitz code. The original Snitz forums process the subscriptions at the time the post is submitted. This proved unacceptable as literally thousands of emails might have to be generated - particularly in the case of forum subscriptions. Instead we've developed a back-end batch process that processes any needed subscription emails every minute or so.

Bruce Luckcuck
Director, Applications & Support Services
Wiley Publishing, Inc.

[Imar]

I should give credit where credit is due: It was Peter who initially brought this up.

I was just switching from message based subscriptions (which is almost impossible when you're subscribed to many messages) to forum based subscriptions when Peter suggested it. I thought it was useful too, so I posted the request.

Thanks for implementing this and thanks even more for doing it so quickly.

Cheers,

Imar


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Imar Spaanjaars
Everyone is unique, except for me.

[planoie]

Bruce,

Thanks a bunch for the quick response. I hate to be a pain, but part of the reason I was going to try my hand was to be able to suggest how it might be done. What you have is great if you have email filters. What I had been thinking was something even simpler (or combined with what you added). I was thinking of having the email subject contain some character like an asterisk so that when messages are sorted, you can very easily see what threads you have been involved in without the need to look thru a message. Something like this:

[*P2P_Feed] Enhancement Request

I often will delete an older thread if it has lots of messages because I figure someone else is helping. But I still have to read thru them to remember if I was involved. If you don't have auto preview or a preview pane, then you still have to open the message(s).

Something like the above is also very handy, because in a list of messages that are sorted by subject (and thus by forum,thread) this would put all "involved" threads at the top of the list.

Obviously, what you added has minimal impact on the users as it's only a slight addition to the email contents. But just thought I would suggest it.

Thanks,
Peter

[Hal Levy]

Whatever is done- do not change the information between the brackets- people already sort on that.

Hal Levy
Web Developer, PDI Inc.

NOT a Wiley/Wrox Employee

[bluckcuck]

It's not a problem to make other changes to the content or the subject line.

I would suggest that we discuss it further to see which solution works best for everyone. As Hal mentioned, I don't think we want to change the part inside of the brackets. Many people have email rules that key off of this info.

Also, remember that the part after the brackets is the subject of the topic. There's nothing to stop someone from putting a "*" in the subject when they create a topic. This could confuse your email rules or sorting.

Bruce Luckcuck
Director, Applications & Support Services
Wiley Publishing, Inc.

[Imar]

Well, you could add the * in front of the entire topic, e.g.:

*[P2P_Feed] Enhancement Request

That way, Peter's suggestion would still work, while it wouldn't mess with any other mail filtering rules. That is, if people set up filters using Contains, rather than Starts With....
An additional * in the message subject wouldn't cause a problem either, as that would appear after the closing ].

An X header is probably not going to work either, as many Web based mail programs don't support filtering on headers.

If I had to vote for anything, I'd vote for *[P2P_Feed] Enhancement Request

Imar


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Imar Spaanjaars
Everyone is unique, except for me.

[planoie]

My vote goes to this as well:

*[P2P_Feed] Enhancement Request

(Just discovered that it seems mail filters/rules don't work on IMAP accounts in outlook because there's no "when a message arrives" event in an IMAP account.)

Peter
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Work smarter, not harder.