UPDATED: I’ve reset the default notification preferences so email notifications about public forum activity like replies to your posts and mentions and quotes do not send an email by default and users will need to opt-in for these emails. Users will still get normal forum notifications about these, you just won’t get an email for each one.
Users will still be notified by email if someone sends a Private Message directly and they are away from the forum unless they have manually changed that setting.
If you have use for email notifications about public forum activity, please check your preferences and set notifications appropriately.
Click on your Avatar drop down, choose “Profile” then “Preferences” and choose the “Emails” tab:
For the record, this is because the forum software was sending out about 300 emails per day. It’s very likely that most of those go to inactive users who have filtered them out. We want these emails to be opt-in.
Might I request that “Email me when I am sent a personal message” be enabled by default? Often it’s the only way to reach a forum user who may not have been active recently.
I’d also prefer to leave that one on by default. If someone doesn’t come on the forum often enough to see this message, I’d still want a PM to reach them.
Wouldn’t ‘only when away’ be the best default for emails? Because if you’re not ‘away’, it gives the big glowing envelope, and if we’re trying to contact long gone people, they will certainly be ‘away’.
Yes, the previous default was it would email after 5 minutes if you hadn’t already read it. I don’t know if that’s considered “always” or “only when away”.
Edit: ah, the Discourse default would be to send an email for PMs after only 20 seconds. So on other Discourse forums the “always” behaviour probably means that unless you see it in those 20 seconds it would send an email.
So I think on our site the difference between “always” and “only when away” is 5 minutes vs 10 minutes. Not really a big difference
Edit 2: Looks like @HanonO has changed the new default to be “only when away”. If anyone wants to change theirs to “never” you may need to do it again.
