it is a bad website.
Do you mean EuroGA is a bad website, or do you mean that a website which requires emailed digests to be usable is a bad website?
Many years ago I used RSS to “read” certain forums and it worked ok on one forum (which, like EuroGA used some sort of custom code) and was rubbish on all the others (which used stock code e.g. PHP-BB or Vbulletin). Also, today, nobody could get the digests unless they enable the GDPR-mandated checkbox, which the forum regulars have done but almost nobody else does, especially newcomers who fear loads of spam.
The other “modern” problem with regular email digests is that you need only a few grumpy (or malicious!) recipients to mark them as spam, and the server ends up blacklisted for a while and then a lot of them don’t get delivered. That is why, when I do the few mailings a year about fly-ins and such, I send them out with a 1 minute interval, which takes for ever, and they go only to people who have logged in within the past year.
No it is a bad website.
Well, what I would really like is a Mailing List / NNTP gateway, which would allow me to use my own software of choice, with the features I want, etc. Next best thing is getting the new posts with body by email.
Peter wrote:
know this sounds a bit silly but the real issue seems to be that users who visit the forum relatively rarely cannot keep up with the new posts. And there isn’t a great solution for that.
I for one consider myself a regular, and I would find such a feature useful. The issue is not really longer absences, but it arises at any time I do not read all interesting stuff in one go. In fact, I believe it occurs frequently when I actually post something longer, since that interrupts the “let’s read some new stuff” session, and by the time I am back it is difficult to find the place where I left off.
Well for me it works with the method I described. With a collection of all unread threads you can pick those that you currently have time for. And those that you decide to read later don’t get forgot. Sometimes there is only a small backlog, sometimes it tends to grow. But on average I can keep up with the pace of every forum I read so far.
But right now I am stuck with the proposed way to go through them in the reverse order of last posts. And that makes it bit unhandy.
E.g. in a 5 minute break I maybe only want to review the threads I participated in (from Mine), but when I read them, I already cut gaps in the Active Threads list.
I know this sounds a bit silly but the real issue seems to be that users who visit the forum relatively rarely cannot keep up with the new posts. And there isn’t a great solution for that.
We get best part of 100 posts per day and it is still slowly rising, and unless you read them all, there will always be unread posts, and they will accumulate.
But maybe I have misunderstood, which is well possible because I read the forum mostly via a different “mod feed” which is just a linear (thread-less) list of all posts.
Thanks for your open words, David. I will live with it and so do others. If you decide otherwise and should need a tester one day, just let me know.
Fair enough. We don’t currently have that feature. I’m afraid it’s unlikely that it will be added any time soon. Whilst we do have the data internally, it will require creating new functionality that doesn’t currently exist, together with testing and so forth and that’s quite a bit of effort, however simple it might appear. Not only would we have to custom built it for EuroGA, which doesn’t generate any revenue to pay for such endeavours, this is the first request we’ve had for it in several years. I’m not saying other people wouldn’t like it too, but there isn’t an overwhelming demand for it. Sorry I can’t be more help on this occasion – if it was a 15 minute job I would do it.
But the problem is if the list has 100 entries with new and I start to read entry 20-50, then these are still displayed when I reload active threads and hence there is a gap. So for my personal usage behaviour this is not fulfilling the purpose. Shouldn’t it be relatively easy to provide a filter like my suggestion where I can see only unread active threads?
There isn’t something that is precisely what you ask for. Active Threads does effectively the same thing though – as you mention, any with “New” by them have new posts that you’ve not seen, and given they’re in reverse chronological order, all the threads listed with New by them come first. So the list you’re after is everything from the start of the list until when the word New stops appearing. Hope that helps.
