HOWEVER, there is no cooldown/ protection against this feature being abused.
During testing, I managed to spam notify people, by using the notify feature, It seems I can notify as many people as I want, as on many topics/replies as I want.
The only way to punish a user for abusing this feature, is by having someone report the spammer to a moderator, who will have to suspend the account, silencing the account will not prevent this feature from being abused.
My Idea:
For each trust level, they should be limited to how any many people they can notify daily, this will help keep this feature in use & and will also prevent people being spammed by this feature.
I would even consider the benefits of going one further, and have a whitelist feature in the user preferences. This would allow you to recieve notifications from personally trusted users/Groups, which is particularly useful if the community is > 1000 members.
I think a lot would depend on how much the notify feature is getting hammered? I’m afraid it’s not a popular feature on the sites I’m on, so I can’t quite envisage those being useful to me personally - but now we can point to posts as well as topics, I think it could be more so in the future?
For an occasional over-excited user (/troll ) a daily base limit, trust level multiplier, and min trust level, similar to some of the other TL restricted features, may be enough peace of mind for me.
Though, as @Tris20 said, if you have a big membership and the notify feature is very popular, then giving it something like the PM whitelist may be beneficial too. And if you’re getting lots of notify notifications, consolidating them into a page like the consolidated Likes could also be good to bundle some noise into something more useful.
Is the ‘notify about this post’ only for Desktop? When I click the icon in the post menu my phone opens up its own pop-up rather than the Discourse one, and the notify option doesn’t seem to be available by pressing on the timestamp? Is there another way?
It’s working on my browser, on my phone it doesn’t, however I think this is intentional, but a strange way of doing it, kinda defuses the point of implementing the feature.
Because I am concerned this could become a bigger issues if I don’t try to resolve it as soon as possible, at the moment nobody from my community has discovered this, but it just takes one troll to make this such a massive issue.
If I’m not mistaken you could remove the share button from the post menu parameter (or at least hide it) https://your.domain/admin/site_settings/category/all_results?filter=share
For topics, that has always existed at the bottom of the page. It’s not a new feature and has mostly gone unused since its inception (until now).
All of this might by my fault though. I recently endorsed (and bumped) a topic requesting that the “Notify” feature be expanded to replies too.
Oops?
Regardless, I agree that site admins should have more control over it. I’m just worried that it could seriously impact the ability to notify multiple users in one batch.
Edit: Yup, you beat me to it. Regardless, the button should definitely be removed. There’s still a lot of work that needs to be done with the unified share dialog.
I disagree. On a forum where I am TL3 if we find a user saying that they are under 13 (COPPA), we need to notify an admin so they can contact the user about it. And if no admins are online at that time there is less we can do about it.
) a daily base limit, trust level multiplier, and min trust level, similar to some of the other TL restricted features, may be enough peace of mind for me.
icon in the post menu my phone opens up its own pop-up rather than the Discourse one, and the notify option doesn’t seem to be available by pressing on the timestamp? Is there another way?
