Large PM threads flooding e-mail inboxes with notifications...

thunderdragon

Hey everyone! Long time no post! 👋 🙂
Thanks to the lockdown it’s been a very long time since I’ve had access to the Internet for anything other than the most critical purposes^, so yesterday was the first time I’d had access to e-mail in over two months. I know we all tend to have flooded inboxes anyway, but - Having been added to a large and high-trafficed PM thread in my absence - I found that my inbox had over 1,000 unread notification threads from the Community, and this had pushed my inbox to pretty near its quota…And this is in GMail, which (Thankfully) groups individual e-mails into threads. Gods forbid what would happen if one had to download that volume of messages over POP-3/MS Outlook (Which a lot of people are still using! 🙂 ).

Of course; Now I have access to Community today I’ve been able to change my notification settings and disable PM notifications by e-mail, but there’s a couple of suggestions I’d like to table to make this less of a problem for users in similar circumstances going forward… 😇

Perhaps a limit could be set for the number of notification e-mails sent out, after which no more are sent until the user has viewed the thread. This’d keep the number of e-mails to a manageable level if the user isn’t aware they’re receiving them. 🙂
If the board combined all notifications from a single day into a digest-style e-mail this’d limit traffic to one e-mail per day, or a much easier to handle 60 unread e-mails in the above case. This’d also allow the board to send mails out during night hours when bandwidth is cheaper, and save bandwidth by sending only one e-mail per member. 👍️
Don’t assume that a user has constant, live access to their e-mail, even in todays day and age. E-mail is an offline medium by design (It works in the same way as a P.O. box) so it needs to be remembered that some inboxes might go uncollected for quite considerable periods of time! 🕰️

Anyhow, here’s hoping you are all staying safe and well. Been an extremely difficult eight weeks for me I will freely admit…But I’m still alive and kicking, even if in a very limited sense! 🤯 🙂
+++ 🚄 ThunderDragon 🤘 +++

(^ - A neighbour has granted me access to their connectivity so that I can still do essential things like place orders and access online services, but because they’re on a metered Internet contract I have to keep my usage as low/lean as I possibly can - Hence basics only and no Community access of late. Now those of us living alone are allowed to visit others in the same circumstances I’m able to use a friends unlimited connection, although that again depends on lockdown not being tightened again if the R-value goes up. 💊 🤯 )

mrjeeves

thunderdragon no Community access of late

Remember that if you're with giffgaff as your network, the community is totally free to access (doesn't use up any of your data/credit). You won't see external images or emoji, though.

Bearing in mind that Flarum is still beta software, it's very likely this is on the list of things to add.

I do prefer your second suggestion of a digest-type email. I'd prefer if this could be customised. I'd want to receive emails about direct replies separately (so I can see them quicker) but keep new posts, etc, in a digest-type email. This is a really interesting concept, and probably possible.

dtuxcomp

thunderdragon Hi mate, I agree with your suggestions, we’ve had some head scratching trying to get on top of this in a PD I started and a couple of people accidentally left the conversation trying to stop the notification storm. I think part of the issue is that for any given post you can often receive 3 notifications, one for someone posting in a PD you’re a part of, one to say they’ve posted and a 3rd for their reaction to a post. Recently this has seemed to get worse after an update to the PD system that has lead to incorrect emails saying someone has replied instead of reacted, so people have been going to PD’s looking for new replies and not finding any.

You can “un-follow” a PD thread which “should” stop the notifications until you next post in the thread, but I found that was hit and miss, or I was confusing myself 🙂

What would be really useful for this would be a much more fine grained option for the emails and / or community notifications where you could turn them off for certain threads. I keep my emails on for PD’s only not all community notifications so I know if there’s a PD waiting for me when I’m not on the community, but it would be nice to be able to pick something like the daily digest single mail for high traffic PD’s wouldn’t it 🙂

thunderdragon

mrjeeves Remember that if you’re with giffgaff as your network, the community is totally free to access (doesn’t use up any of your data/credit).

That’s certainly news to me! I remember seeing a lot of support cases from members over time asking why their credit/data was being deducted for Community access, and it was pointed out that - Though access to the giffgaff main site is free of charge if the member has no credit - Access to Community is always regarded the same as access to any external website, and chargeable thereby… 🤯

If this reveals - As your post makes me suspect - That Community access has been made free without some of us having been made aware of it, some questions might need to be raised about how this information didn’t reach the people who may well have endured less solitude and pain if they’d been correctly furnished with it. I certainly would remember if I’d received any SMS to that effect! 🙁

Although that said; The only SIM I have an active GoodyBag on is the SIM in my (Feature) phone and having to swap that from the phone to a data device every time I need to access Community would rapidly wear out the SIM, as well as causing me to miss a lot of calls and texts. I’ve been asking giffgaff to support “portioning out” of GB allowances over associated SIMs for years now (So I can pay for one GB, have calls & SMS on one device and data access through another - The way I’m impacted by my disabilities obliges this sort of division) but they still havn’t done it. 😐
+++ 🚄 ThunderDragon 🤘 +++

mrjeeves

thunderdragon That’s certainly news to me!

It's been the case since at least 2014, though I remember in 2015 all the way up to the move to Flarum some people were still giving advice saying that the community isn't free rated.

I don't believe that the multiple SIMs with one set of allowances is going to be a possibility any time soon. This is based on the fact that giffgaff's implementation of managing multiple SIMs on one account is by allowing you to be logged into multiple accounts on the new app, rather than fixing the root problem.

jesi23

thunderdragon That Community access has been made free without some of us having been made aware of it

I joined the network at the end of September 2014 and giffgaff.com was always free to access; the Community was always mixed: _{giffgaff content free!} anything hosted externally was either ‘not supported’ (so limited functionality) or chargeable (if you had data). My phones never had ‘the internet’ like a normal Smartphone (feature phones) although my Motorola RAZR and Blackberry Curve pretended to have limited access to some websites like BBC news, and Microsoft Messenger. My home Livebox WiFi had limited slots for wireless and Ethernet connection, and we had printer, second phone, three laptops and two Blackberry phones, so no free slot for my iPad. I was using free WiFi outside home until I got my giffgaff SIM.

It has always been frustrating to have to pay for calls/texts not required or usable in a ‘data-only’ device, while needing to pay for unwanted data for my ‘feature phones’ which did not use data. However, I believe giffgaff have gone the right way by making Goodybags totally data dependant for price.

I actually agree with the unlimited UK calls/SMS for all Goodybags which has been in effect since 26 February 2020, since it eliminated one variable from the equation for deciding which Goodybag to purchase. A £6 Goodybag covers any texts/calls in the feature phone (or PAYG when most calls are going to be giffgaff-to-giffgaff). I have 2 feature phones and at least one is generally on PAYG at any one time.

I bought a Windows Phone (Lumia 640) refurbished from giffgaff a year ago, and currently have a £20 Goodybag in it (it gives 81GB including the 1GB buffer) which supports sharing Internet with up to 8 devices. Currently, that is all the Internet access my husband and I have (besides his iPhone, bought refurbished from giffgaff, on a £10 Goodybag).

My iPad doesn’t support a HotSpot over WiFi, but I did manage to tether my laptop to the cellular Internet over Bluetooth at the beginning of Lockdown.

It is actually easier to use the Community without credit or Goodybag since we have been using the Flarum platform rather than Lithium, as the way the platform utilises outside sources seems to be more intuitive, and giffgaff have more control on the way features are used!

I hope you are not offended by my direct contradiction to your claims; obviously, as a pensioner, I am very ‘precious’ about my financial state, but I have never had problem accessing help on the Community (just having to wait minutes for pages to load, on occasion). I even participated in an experiment sans credit, sans Goodybag, sans WiFi to access agent pages a couple of months ago. It still worked.

I am sorry you didn’t realise you could have used the Community. Emojis don’t work or some user-uploaded content, but basic functionality has always been there.

The worst time was after the ‘mobile-responsive’ platform Lithium forced on us without adequate testing, when everything stopped working properly with or without credit for a time, including being logged in and out without warning multiple times within a session. So grateful for our Flarum platform being so forgiving!

As a side issue, my notification emails always say that ‘you will not receive another notification until you visit the thread’ … and for some reason, Outlook keeps filtering my giffgaff notifications into Junk … makes it easy to find them!🤣🤣 just _{go directly to Junk, do not pass ‘GO!’ Do not collect £200! _🤡}

thunderdragon

mrjeeves It’s been the case since at least 2014, though I remember in 2015 all the way up to the move to Flarum some people were still giving advice saying that the community isn’t free rated.

Up until now, that was still my understanding…And in absence of an official, direct announcement by giffgaff (i.e. via SMS) plus my awareness of how much data accessing Community tends to consume at the user end, my understanding this was still the case was certainly not unreasonable! 🤯

@t_will Is there any reason why this information wasn’t overtly pushed out to regular Community users via SMS and other direct means at the time, please? Awareness of this prior to the start of lockdown might have spared me a lot of pain indeed over these past ten weeks… 🤯 🙁

mrjeeves I don’t believe that the multiple SIMs with one set of allowances is going to be a possibility any time soon. This is based on the fact that giffgaff’s implementation of managing multiple SIMs on one account is by allowing you to be logged into multiple accounts on the new app, rather than fixing the root problem.

And a problem it is indeed, especially with O2 having supported SIM “Families” for years now. As well as classic family use, the fact that even people like me (In a heavily destitute position) now have multiple devices means that allowing multiple SIMs and allowances to be grouped by user or family makes perfect sense… 🤔
+++ 🚄 ThunderDragon 🤘 +++

t_will

I’ll have to double check (edit: checked and confirmed! Thank you @ianmorland), but yes, my understanding is that not only is it possible to access the community without any credit, but it has been for years - to the point where a special announcement wouldn’t have been necessary, because it was already established (and if people are saying otherwise, we’d love to know about it so we can make sure they know they need to give better help). It’s because we want people to be able to access help even if they have no funds - for example, if someone’s having trouble understanding what a goodybag is before they buy one, they shouldn’t have to pay extra to find that out from you all.

It’s important to note, though, that being able to access the community without any credit isn’t the same as the community being free to access entirely. Because a big part of the community is member-posted content, we can’t guarantee that any pages will be free, and even some assets that are part of the community - like emojis - are loaded from off-domain. I know you’ve already said that @mrjeeves so sorry to repeat - but I think we need to be very careful with language here. If we say “It’s free!” then someone might lose credit because they were scrolling through a thread in GD with a lot of graphics loaded from elsewhere, thinking they wouldn’t be charged.

If someone has no credit or goodybag, the intent is that the page simply won’t load the chargeable content, but will load everything else, so they can still get support - but if they do, loading the assets that aren’t on giffgaff.com will be chargeable.

mrjeeves

dtuxcomp an update to the PD system that has lead to incorrect emails saying someone has replied instead of reacted

That was fixed (at least on the PD extension). I assume the fix was pushed to the main community, but it’s definitely on Preview.

ianmorland

dtuxcomp for any given post you can often receive 3 notifications, one for someone posting in a PD you’re a part of, one to say they’ve posted and a 3rd for their reaction to a post

You’ll be extremely pleased to know that all of this is now resolved, at least on the preview site, as @mrjeeves says.

We’re not quite ready to roll out all of the updates to the main community just yet, so please bear with us just a little longer on this one 🙂

dtuxcomp

mrjeeves Hopefully it’ll start to ease the confusing flow then.

dtuxcomp

ianmorland bear with us

“GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR” !!!!! 😛

Sorry, but that’s the law, if someone says bear with me you have to growl 😉 🙂 🐻

It’ll be good to see the difference once it reaches the full platform 🙂

jesi23

jesi23 Just as an update @thunderdragon to the above: I found that £6 (500MB) wasn’t always enough to cover variations in signal making the iPad take over, but the 2GB offered by the £8 does cover me. I usually allow at least a day ‘data-free’ with no credit before buying a new Goodybag on the iPad.

My husband found that having Zoom meetings on his laptop in the other room was sometimes more effective/stable if he connected via HotSpot on his iPhone rather than the Windows Phone with everything else, but when not using his HotSpot, he links his iPhone to the Windows Phone like everything else! 🤣80GB plus the 1GB buffer has been enough for our usage without even purchasing a Goodybag early.

Currently, @serving_n_a_j has 5 days left, and is on his extra GB (+963.6 MB extra remaining) on his £10 Goodybag so we bought him a £12 Goodybag queued using part of his £14 payback instead of his usual £10 recurred Goodybag just to see how he got on, since he sometimes forgets he has not turned off his HotSpot! He is allowed ‘senior moments’ at 72yrs old! Hopefully, it will start as planned at 00:00 on 04/07/2020, but if need be we can start his queued Goodybag early!
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