Ask HN: Designing an effective email notification system for a forum

2 pointsmaverhick2 comments

Most of the forums I've used/subscribed to are vbulletin or IPS based forums. Every time you make post and someone replies, you get an email notification. Once you get even decently active, the no. of notifications just rocket up. If 30 people replied to your post in a day, that is 30 email notifications. Damn.

Has anyone gotten email notifications for forums right? Any ideas?

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Hmm I am pretty sure on quite a few of them (eg. mobileread.com) I have the option of a daily thread digest of subscribed threads. Not sure what the underlying platform is.

Off the top of my head I suspect what I really want is for any thread I mark or reply to to be added to my RSS reader. AFAIK most platforms only offer per-topic RSS subscriptions.

http://xing.com does it pretty well...

Perhaps more or less like this: Build a notification-queue for each user; store the time of the first item; every x check the queues if the first item is older than x send all items as a batch and flush the queue.

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