Stupid Designs

[andrewducker]

Just left a comment on BenWerd's blog post here and was surprised to notice that there's no way to receive email notifications whenever a reply is left to it.

Which strikes me as the quickest way to discourage discussion I can think of.

The alternative it provides is an RSS feed, which is staggeringly less efficient - it means that I have to have an RSS feed for each discussion I want to pay attention to, and that each person who wants to scan discussions has to set this up (which is a lot of clutter) - and then the server will get hit on an hourly basis (or more often) on discussions that aren't generating any new comments.

Comments

[andrewducker]

I'm not blaming Ben here, though - he's using an off the shelf piece of software. It's just one with stupid functionality in one respect.

[andlosers.livejournal.com]

Aw, bugger. I genuinely had never noticed that it wasn't provided out of the box. I'll see if I can find a plugin.

[andlosers.livejournal.com]

Right. Thanks for pointing that out; not that it helps you this time, but that functionality's now been installed.

[andrewducker]

Aha! Impressive work Mr W!

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Yes.

I've watched this sort of thing happen elsewhere, and I fail to see why I should participate in discussions where the code can't manage emailed notifications and the option to thread comments.

I've already done dial-up BBS stuff, ta.

[andrewducker]

Threaded makes me much happier too, but no notifications is a dealbreaker.

[a-pawson.livejournal.com]

Isn't it a bit strange though that despite all these new (so called web 2.0) applications, we still rely on Email to be made aware of changes or replies.

[andrewducker]

Nope. Email works, is ubiquitous and an open standard. To replace it you'd need something else that was a ubiquitous open standard that did everything email does.

[simont]

I think a more important factor than standardisation is that email is a push protocol. All the supposed alternatives such as RSS require you to separately poll each thing you're interested in, so if you read N things you have to do O(N) setup work, and an ongoing O(N) actual network activity every time you poll, and you also have to decide how often you want to poll so as to trade off network load against late notification.

Even if email weren't quite so standard, and there were (say) ten competing push protocols for this sort of notification, you'd probably be able to find a single server program which would support them all, and then you'd only have to set that up once no matter how much stuff you wanted to keep up with – and there wouldn't be the need to choose a poll frequency at all.

(And I expect there'd be websites to run that server on behalf of people without the resources/skills to run it themselves; the end user would have to poll that one website, but that's still a reasonably bounded amount of work.)

[andlosers.livejournal.com]

Ten different push protocols would still be more open than a proprietary API (at least in theory). There are ways to make this sort of notification push - for example, Wave uses XMPP under the hood. PubSubHubbub also attempts to make this easier, although I don't think it qualifies are true push.

There's a certain amount of irony to this requirement, because I seem to remember a huge buzz around web-based push systems in around 1998 ...

[errolwi.livejournal.com]

I don't find the setup required to occasionally follow discussion threads via bloglines at all onerous 95% of the time (e.g. Making Light's comment RSS doesn't work if you just click the button for some reason I haven't been bothered looking into). I do find it irritating if there is no way to follow comments without making a comment - sometimes I will leave a post flagged unread for a couple of days to remind me to go back and take a look.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

I like that it's asynchronous and low-bandwidth.

I have a life (no, really...) to be getting on with, and polling (as in going to look at, rather than furtling the browser to manage it) a set of websites seems to be a bit of a waste. (Assuming yr personal email-handling routine just sets a flag, etc.)

[nameandnature]

Everything is worse than Usenet. Oh well.

Off LJ, I just add the comment feed in Google Reader. Since that's set up to show only the feeds with something in them, it's not like I care about pruning my subscriptions for conversations which have died. Since feeds are inefficient but have caught on anyway, I don't see why a comment feed is much worse than a feed of postings.

I don't know whether Google has some sort of back-off algorithm for feeds which become quiet. Certainly it should be well behaved about using E-tag and If-Modified-Since. If the server is similarly optimised (which LJ isn't, ISTR), the bandwidth demand from a quiet feed is quite small.