INSTANT email Notification

[tim]

________________________________
move along nothing to see here folks!

[eclectica]

The following email features of the board have been disabled:
-Report Bad Post
-Email a Member
-Email this Page to a Friend
-Thread/Forum subscriptions notices to members

Actually all I wanted to do was disallow forum subscriptions, but the control for the board cuts off all of those email features in one setting.

Here's why I disabled forum subscriptions. I feel that when people are subscribing to particular threads, that they really aren't participating in the forum but only to a narrow interest of one thread. I don't want to help people have that type of participation level here, so I turned it off. Subscription to forum threads is also a tool for one who has the Ego (http://www.winternet.com/~mikelr/flame45.html) personality, who wants to be sure that he dominates certain threads or gets the last word in. And another problem with thread subscriptions, is that a copy of the posts people initially make gets sent by way of email to the person who subscribed to the thread, so that even if the person edits the post after making it, then that original post will still be intact in the thread subscriber's email. It creates a permanence to what should be an editable post, and the thread subscriber will see the raw post in the email rather than the final post on the forum.

[eclectica]

does this affect new member registrations? i've noticed bulgarian6 is still waiting email confirmation
It does not affect new registrations to the forum or email notification of your new PMs.

When a new member finally confirms the email, he goes from being in the "awaiting email confirmation" group to "registered" members group. However, it looks like the title doesn't change until I update the user titles, as a normal maintenance action in the admincp. I'm not sure why it's not instantaneous and I want to look into that more. (Perhaps it's because of the custom title "dildo du jour", which works after zero posts and zero days, and users awaiting email confirmation also meet the threshold of zero posts and zero days, so it doesn't change anything) In any case, once a member is registered then the member will be displayed on the Members's List (http://www.3-3-3.org/forum/memberlist.php). The info on the index page is a bit wrong, because it says there are 61 members, but actually 3 of them are awaiting email confirmation. I usually delete members in that class after a month or so. If you look on the Members's List, it will display only the 58 registered members here.

[eclectica]

I found a more efficient way to disable Thread Subscriptions without the overkill. I simply deleted the script forum/subscription.php. I then restored the other email functions for the users:
-Report Bad Post
-Email a Member
-Email this Page to a Friend

Now if you try to subscribe to a thread, it will take you to a dead link:
http://www.3-3-3.org/forum/subscription.php

[eclectica]

I tested it some more and found that that doesn't stop old thread subscriptions after all. All it stops is users editing their subscriptions. And if they have it set to subscribe to all forum threads then nothing is changed. So I restored things to how they were yesterday, and once again the four email features aren't working:
-Report Bad Post
-Email a Member
-Email this Page to a Friend
-Thread/Forum subscriptions notices to members

[Dollar_Girl]

do people in america really have phone numbers starting with "555-" like they portray in the movies?

555-4858 ?

[eclectica]

do people in america really have phone numbers starting with "555-" like they portray in the movies?

555-4858 ?
Those numbers are fake because someone might call the number for real after seeing the movie. I believe that 555-1212 is a real number for information though. Maybe a few information numbers work on that exchange.

[Dollar_Girl]

do u all speak the way u write on the forum? I noticed that i have a diff vocab for when i speak and a diff one when i write. I think we tend to bullshit more in writting than in speaking. I do anyway.

[eclectica]

With a little more work I once again enabled the following email feautures:
-Report Bad Post
-Email a Member
-Email this Page to a Friend

But thread subscriptions are no longer working.

I had to go through a few acrobatics to get this working right. I first had to delete the script forum/subscription.php. Then in phpMyAdmin, a database editing and browsing tool, I found the table called "subscribethread". After hitting "browse" I was able to see every thread that every user was subscribed to. I then selected to empty the table. That then cancelled everybody's thread subscriptions on this forum. However, there are those who had chosen in their user settings on the board to automatically subscribe to every thread. To fix that, I first found the template called in the user options (http://www.3-3-3.org/forum/profile.php?do=editoptions) in which one chooses the nature of forum subscriptions. It is controlled by the template "modifyoptions". I found it and deleted the following out of the template and saved it in each style:
<option value="0" $emailchecked[0]>$vbphrase[no_email_notification]</option>
<option value="1" $emailchecked[1]>$vbphrase[instant_email_notification]</option>
<option value="2" $emailchecked[2]>$vbphrase[daily_email_notification]</option>
<option value="3" $emailchecked[3]>$vbphrase[weekly_email_notification]</option>
After locking people out of altering their forum subscription settings, my final action was to go into every user's board settings by way of phpMyAdmin and manually set them all to having no thread subscriptions. It is found in the "user" table. There one of the variables is "autosubscribe". If set to -1, thread subscriptions are disabled. If set to 1, they have subscribed to forum threads. I went to every person's settings which wasn't set to -1, and changed them. A lot of users had a value of 1, which I believe is because it used to be the default setting for those registering when the board was running on vBulletin 2.XX. There may be a way to mass edit the settings of the variables in phpMyAdmin, but I don't know how to do that. Actually this morning I tried to do just that by checking the "autosubscribe" variable and then I selected to empty the table. What it did was empty the entire user table rather than that particular variable, causing all information to be lost and the forum to be made of zero members and all the posts attributed to guests, meaning we were all unregistered here. So then I restored the database from a backup I made a few minutes earlier, which is pretty easy to do in CPanel.

phpMyAdmin is a really powerful tool, and if you click the wrong thing you could knock out the entire forum. I wouldn't dare leave it open unsupervised when my daughter is around, for she could start playing with the computer mouse and cause all sorts of trouble.
:fright:

[eclectica]

do u all speak the way u write on the forum? I noticed that i have a diff vocab for when i speak and a diff one when i write. I think we tend to bullshit more in writting than in speaking. I do anyway.
I think in slow motion; slower than normal speech, so I find that I express myself better as a writer than as a public speaker. I am a quiet person when it comes to speaking, but well-spoken when it comes to writing.

My writing style is more perfect than my speaking style. When writing I choose my words carefully, and I try to phrase them correctly. I often preview posts several times before posting them, and then continue to edit them afterwards. My perfected writing style borders on an akwardness which I don't have as much when speaking in real life. But people still think I am British or a foreigner, because of the way I speak, due to my eloquence which is not typically American.

[Dollar_Girl]

I think in slow motion; slower than normal speech, so I find that I express myself better as a writer than as a public speaker. I am a quiet person when it comes to speaking, but well-spoken when it comes to writing.

My writing style is more perfect than my speaking style. When writing I choose my words carefully, and I try to phrase them correctly. I often preview posts several times before posting them, and then continue to edit them afterwards. My perfected writing style borders on an akwardness which I don't have as much when speaking in real life. But people still think I am British or a foreigner, because of the way I speak, due to my eloquence which is not typically American.

i notice your perfected writing, and i also know, as u have told us previously, that you preview posts several times... that is why, a couple of weeks ago, when i found the one and only spelling error in one of your posts ever, my heart skipped beats and my toes went numb. It was orgasmic. You really know how to please a woman ay.

[eclectica]

a couple of weeks ago, when i found the one and only spelling error in one of your posts ever, my heart skipped beats and my toes went numb. It was orgasmic. You really know how to please a woman ay.
It must have been a forum glitch. I want to see the proof.

I make spelling errors more frequently than I have sex, so of course when I make them it will have to be orgasmic.
:sperm:

[eclectica]

I found more templates in which the option to subscribe to threads was still available. Here are all the templates which need to be modified:
editpost editing a post
modifyoptions in the user control panel (see posts above)
newreply either posting a reply, quoting, or adding a post to a thread
newthread making new threads

All four templates need this to be removed from it:
<option value="0" $emailchecked[0]>$vbphrase[no_email_notification]</option>
<option value="1" $emailchecked[1]>$vbphrase[instant_email_notification]</option>
<option value="2" $emailchecked[2]>$vbphrase[daily_email_notification]</option>
<option value="3" $emailchecked[3]>$vbphrase[weekly_email_notification]</option>
And that leaves people only with the option of "Do not subscribe" under thread subscription notification type.

I am able to see what templates are working on the forum by first going into the admincp and seeing vBulletin Options-->General Settings and selecting yes for "Add Template Name in HTML Comments".

[eclectica]

I hope I got it working right now. I made it so that the option "Do not subscribe" is still intact everywhere. A couple of days ago, I had removed too much from the templates editpost, newreply, and newthread; creating some kind of template bug but that caused people to be subscribed to threads whenever they edited or posted in them.

If you can figure out a way around my blocks and you still manage to subscribe to threads in this forum, then you are l33t.
:cool: