grouping forum email notification

[musicales]

I just posted something here, 3rd post in the thread. A few minutes later got an email notifying me of the 2nd message. I've long wondered how it's grouped like that - where you often get just one notification if 5 posts have been made in the last 5 minutes - presumably some kind of timer checks a thread and sends them out every so often. The way I've always had to do it is just send it to everyone when every new message is added, but here seems to work differently. Anyone got any ideas how that's done? (Brett presumably does!)

[rogerd]

Normally we don't talk about WebmasterWorld-specific concerns here (that goes in the WebmasterWorld Community forum), but I think it's an interesting topic.

These days, forum software is getting more sensitive to spam issues, and different approaches are being used. I don't know the technical details, but it looks like mail is being queued and consolidated to avoid a barrage of multiple messages.

vBulletin's current approach is to notify you of the first new post in a thread you subscribed to, but no others until you log in. In the old days, subscribing to a busy thread might net you a hundred messages in a day - bad news for a lot of reasons.

I've got one forum on old software that does notification on every new post. I finally turned off the feature because people were getting overwhelmed, mailboxes were maxing out and bouncing, etc.

It's very easy these days for forum members to sign up for notifications and, when they no longer want them, block those as spam via their ISP. Sure, they could return to the site and change their preferences, but it's easier to click the "This is SPAM" button. Therefore, a benign, low-volume notification approach is best.