Shoutbox

I have been thinking about this some time... exactly 5 minutes, and I've thought that all e-mail notifications could be sent when the member is offline, because if I'm currently signed in the board and using it, I'll know when someone replied to my posts.
This would be done by adding a third option when asked Enable Email Notification?    [ Yes | Only when I'm offline | No ].
Look up the status of the user won't load the server, I think, and it will nicely decrease the SMTP-traffic.

Hope you like the idea.

Sounds like a nice idea, not too hard to implement either

Nice idea, however i won't use it. I like the way it's now.

Well, WDZ is online, he could tell us if he likes it, too...

How do I know if you're online or offline? What if you close your browser and go chat on MSN or something, and someone replies 2 minutes later?

Well, there's a timeout. For being online when no movement has been tracked, I thinks it's 15min.
Well, when the user is officially offline notifications are sent as normally. I think it's OK that way. I you think it's not, you could store all unread replies, while the user is online, but not idle and delete them when a movement is tracked again (tracking movements is done anyway to keep the status as online, restarting the 15m timer). Otherways if there's no other movement after 15 minutes, the bunch of links are automatically sent to the user (There's no need to quote the content of the posts). Just as:

Before being automatically set to offline, after 15 minutes of inactivity,  next posts were written in the forums/threads you are subscribed to:
http:/...

If you think it's overkill, the easy way may be ok too for some people (I can understand doing the tracking thing is maybe overkill and a lot of work). But anyway I think a lot of people would appreciate this option, prcincipally those who stay for hours logged in and have the Latest Posts refreshing constantly...

quote:

---

Originally posted by WDZ
How do I know if you're online or offline? What if you close your browser and go chat on MSN or something, and someone replies 2 minutes later?

---

$tcheck = time()-600;
$query = $db->query("SELECT * FROM users WHERE lastactive  <='$tcheck'");

Of course it needs a bit of modification to fit in to the other query...but ryou can do that.

But then that brings up another problem, like WDZ said.. You wont receive a notification if you close your browser. You will only receive that notification 6 minutes after you last visited and there may be more posts inbetween that time.

Sorry if I expressed myself poorly . I meant, that whilst the user is online, but idle (maybe away from the computer or having already closed the window) new posts should be stored stored. In the next 6 minutes 2 thinks can happen:

The member comes up again before being set to offline. All stored posts-URLs for him are deleted. He will see them (he has officially not been offline inbetween).

The member is set offline due to inactivity after 6 minutes: A post-URL digest for this time is sent to his address and further posts are notified as usual.

This Post-storing system, I reckon, needs some work. It would need another User-session column or to be saved in files individually for each member. (I don't know how myBB exactly works, never take a serious look at the code, but this it how I imagine it does).

It's just a suggestion I find very confortable. Maybe a little exhausting to implement, but relatively easy to add maybe in future versions of myBB

Edit: If I gather some time I could take a look at the code and try to doing it myself . But that would sure end up with many security issues

Edit 2: Sending the digest may be problematic, because php, afaik, cannot control events by itself and trigger some commands. In frequented boards this shouldn't be a problem, because there's always someone calling a php, but on other sites that might be

Yeah, I think it's too much work to store notifications like that... and even if they were stored, what would trigger them to be sent after a certain amount of time?

Edit: Oh, nice edit.

Checking for queued notifications all the time would add more queries to every page; something I'm not willing to do. There's also no guarantee that someone's going to access the board and trigger the queue check.

And sending the digest along with the first regular notification?

yeah, yeah, no guarantee that someone is gonna post in the meanwhile...

But... tbh, if no notification is sent, the digest could be sent the next time the member logs in:

These are the posts you may have not read right after you left the board last time:
[POSTS]

I agree this is not the philosophy of email notifications... but... I'm sure you understand getting mail while being online is veeery annoying, because, I often have already read the post when it arrives to my inbox.

Well... I'll keep on thinking about it... trying to find another solution