The discussion revolves around the option to disable notifications for one’s own posts in “mailing list mode” on a forum. Users like lake54 and Dan_G highlight that while receiving notifications for one’s own posts mimics traditional mailing list behavior, many users find it unnecessary, especially since it results in emails being sent back to the sender. kpfleming clarifies that the issue pertains to email notifications, not the blue top-bar alerts. codinghorror notes that the consensus in previous discussions supports this behavior, but mochabcha and others argue for a filtering solution to avoid self-emails. ashledombos points out a practical downside: without echoing, users cannot reply to their own threads until others contribute. fefrei acknowledges the benefits of echoing—confirmation of post delivery, ability to reply, and user familiarity—while suggesting that the current system may be overly redundant. The debate centers on balancing usability and user preference in a mailing list-style environment.
Currently users receive notifications of all posts in a topic, including their own. This emulates traditional mailing list behaviour, but many users are familiar with some mail client’s behaviour that “hides” these emails automatically.
Perhaps there could be an option (off by default) to include the user’s own posts in notifications (on would notify them of their post, off would skip it)?
Are you referring to the blue notifications in the top bar of the page? I’ve never seen a notification appear there for my own posts.
Email notifications. Our forum will be migrating from a mailing list, so most users will have the following four options ticked:
Haven’t had time to test myself, but options two and three I believe cause the user to receive even their own posts by email, which is traditional mailing list behaviour, but I don’t think is “modern” behaviour, IMO.
This has been covered elsewhere, but in “mailing list mode” the consensus was that people want this, it is how mailing lists tend to work, etc.
You definitely don’t want to deal with the tons of messages from people reposting because they think their last mail went to /dev/null.
It should either be optional or people can use client-side filters.
Understood (I couldn’t find a post about this, so apologies for the duplicate).
That has indeed been a problem with the current ‘forum’ (Yahoo Groups), it’s a nightmare for having duplicate threads going.
I think an option would be good to have at some point in the future?
I opted not to start another post on this subject, but is there a solution that can filter these emails from going out. Emailing the system and then getting that email sent back to you as a notification is definitely not how the Google Groups system works and definitely not what we want from this new system. It also confuses the doctors who tend to be kinda fragile when it comes to “techy stuff” ( = basically anything updated that isn’t an iPhone).
The problem without echo is that it’s not possible to reply to your own thread until someone else replies.
Yes, here
As far as I see, the following reasons are in favor of echoing your own posts:
All these apply only to posts made via mail – so (as I already said in a support topic) I’d suggest echoing posts only if they were emailed in.