Notice Preferences & Alert Preferences, and User Tagging

As part of the conversion, the default settings for everyone's profile were set so that you would not automatically "watch" threads that you reply to, nor would you receive e-mails when someone replies.

If you are using an account that existed prior to the conversion (April 27th 2015) and you are not receiving email alerts when someone replies to a thread you started or have posted in, you need to check these account settings!!

Please take a minute and update these settings to your liking by hovering over your use icon on the nav bar (between your avatar and your messages icon) and selecting "Alert Preferences", and then the same for "Preferences".

The old site would send out an e-mail for every single reply to a thread. The new site only sends out an e-mail once for each thread you are Watching, until you visit the site again.

Also, for threads that you had previously replied to in the old forum, you won't get alerts for new replies to these either - that is, your "subscribed" thread list was essentially wiped clean. Nothing I could do about that, unfortunately.

Update: Watched threads have been restored. See this thread for details

So if you reply to an existing thread (one that existed prior to the co
nversion), and you don't get a reply from someone who had previously posted on the thread, you can get their attention by typing the "@" sign and then type their username. Xenforo will automatically give you a list of matching usernames as you type, and you can click the one that you are looking for. Try it!

Like this:

@Turbo's Aquatics

 

Additional note:

What was previously referred to as "subscribing"...subscribing to a thread or a whole forum, is now called "Watch".

--->IF<--- you set your preferences to do so, when you reply to a thread, that thread will automatically be placed on your watch list.

--->IF<--- you set your preferences to do so, you will also receive e-mails when someone replies

In addition to email alerts, you can also control the type of alerts you will see in the little red bubbles on the nav bar at the top of each page when you are logged in by setting your Alert Preferences

These do not always automatically generate e-mails. They will always generate an alert and adds to the bubble value, which clears off when you hover over it.

 

Watched threads have been restored. Now, if you reply to a thread that was started prior to the conversion, anyone who posted in that thread will receive an alert (an an e-mail, if they have set their preferences to receive e-mail alerts)

See this thread for details

 

I installed an add-on that enhances the User Tagging function.

Previously, if you tagged a user in a thread that they were not watching, they would get an alert notifying them of this tag in the alerts on the site, but I found that this gets lost in the mix of all the other alerts sometimes...and gets missed.

Now, when you tag someone, they will also get an e-mail alert. They will not get a separate email if they already are going to get one for the thread reply - such as, if they are already watching the thread. But it's a better way to alert someone to get their attention.

Additionally, you can also tag certain User Groups. Each region's User Group starts with the word "Region". So typing the @ sign and following that with Region will pop up a list of all regions. If you are a member of the tagged region, you will get an e-mail letting you know that you have been tagged!

All user default settings have been set to receive this e-mail alert. If you wish to shut this off, go to your Contact Details and uncheck the box for "Receive email when name is mentioned"

 

https://www.greateriowareefsociety.org/account/contact-details

Uncheck the box "Receive email when name is mentioned- Email notifications for mentions from threads, replies, profile posts, etc."

The downside is that not only will this disable the e-mail alert when your region is tagged, it will also disable the email alert when you as an individual are tagged. You will still get and alert on the nav bar (the red bubble) but unless you look at all of those, you might miss it.

I think it's possible that the group tagging is just getting over used. I don't want people to miss out on things because of this so I'll take into consideration putting some restrictions on who can tag groups, for instance, leaving it up to just board members.

 

Additionally you can leave the regional group and you will no longer be tagged. Right now the regional user group function is not ideal and it will likely change so I would just leave the user group, that way you will still get personal tag alerts.

 

See this thread for a more detailed explanation of how you can completely control alerts and emails

Tip - Unsubscribing (e-mail notifications, etc)