Development Organizations Usually Are Slow To Get New Members Going

I guarantee to swamp you soon enough.

Do you have any questions at this point?

 

Kirsten, remember how you used to be a strong advocate for email containing the content of posts? Do you remember what changed your mind on this?

 

I remember exactly what changed my mind on that.

I saw the tremendous benefits of keeping the words on this screen when Holly pointed out how a post could no longer be edited once it had landed in someone's email. The thought of my typos immortalized in someone's inbox was a strong argument in favor of keeping everything in the forum.

I still appreciate getting the posts in my email, but if something doesn't sound right or needs closer scrutiny I make a point of reading it again here. And if there are images involved the only one way to get the whole picture is to log in here, because the images don't show up in email.
Things like "This worked" or "Thank you for help" are great to get in email because it resolves the issue quickly, but long involved discussions benefit from a forum that groups each topic into its own thread.

Oh, you wanted a short answer, didn't you?

I think the flexibility provided by XenForo to receive just notices or the entire text via email is ideal because it allows the user to choose how she wants to interact with the forums. Giving a user informed choices is important to me.

 

Who said I wanted a short answer?

 

I've ranted about this a lot! I figured you'd have enough already.

And after I had written the above post I realized there is a fine distinction in the ways XenForo watches threads. As far as I can tell, there is no option to send just an email notice when there is a reply. You choose to either get the entire post via email, or get an alert the next time you log into the forums.
I will have to ponder that further, because I'm not sure how I feel about that. Is it useful to know that a post has a reply if you don't get the text of the reply? Probably, but only if there is a magic link to whisk me directly to it. Logging in all the time and then hunting it down was the deal breaker for me.

You do know that the magic links changed my perspective on email notices versus the entire posts, right?