New uninformative email notification of Statalist posts

[Mark Schaffer]

Starting Tuesday around 11pm UK time, the subject headers in my automatic email notification of Statalist posts all switched to the following:

"A new post in your Forum Channel subscription: Forums"

Previously the subject header had the topic of the post in it (like Old Statalist), e.g.,

"A new post in your subscription: Refer to specific observation in a generate statement"

The new setup makes email notification near-useless, since I have to open every email to see if there's been a post on a topic that interests me.

Has this happened to everybody? If so, can we please have the old behaviour restored?

[Alan Riley (StataCorp)]

Mark,

I have subscribed to this thread. Can you please reply to this so I can see what the resulting email looks like?

Were you previously receiving emails for every post on every forum, or just for threads you specifically subscribed to?

[Mark Schaffer]

I was receiving emails for every post on every forum. It was a way of mimicking the behaviour of Old Statalist.

Here is what the email notification of your post looked like:

HEADER:
Subject: A new post in your Forum Channel subscription: Forums
From: Statalist <[email protected]>
Sent: Thu 05/02/2015 22:39
To: Schaffer, Mark E

CONTENTS:

Dear Mark Schaffer,

Alan Riley (StataCorp) has made a new post under
New uninformative email notification of Statalist posts

The discussion is located at:
http://www.statalist.org/forums/node/753725

Here is the message that has been posted:
***************
Mark,

I have subscribed to this thread. Can you please reply to this so I can see what the resulting email looks like?

Were you previously receiving emails
***************

All the best,
Statalist

To unsubscribe from this, please visit this page:
http://www.statalist.org/forums/member/98/subscriptions

[Alan Riley (StataCorp)]

Thank you, that helps.

Can you (or anyone else) reply to this again? We are testing some changes to improve the email subject that Mark described.

[Mark Schaffer]

OK, here's a reply.

[Alan Riley (StataCorp)]

We're still not quite there, but getting closer...

[Mark Schaffer]

Call me old school, but if you have some flexibility in choosing the format of the subject heading contents, I'd be very happy to see a return of the Old Statalist format: "st: <topic>".

[Mark Schaffer]

Working again - thanks!

[Mark Schaffer]

It's baaaaack... exactly the bug in email notification that we saw in March 2014 (see the previous discussion in this thread).

Starting Friday the 13th (coincidence?) with the following Statalist post

http://www.statalist.org/forums/node/1316623 (poster "sladmin", contents "just a test" - another coincidence?)

my email notifications all have the uninformative subject header "A new post in your Forum Channel subscription: Forums".

I hope the old behaviour can make another comeback.

[Alan Riley (StataCorp)]

Hopefully the old behavior is back now.

We applied an update from the vBulletin software vendor to the forum software last week. That update undid a fix we made to the core of the software which modified the standard email notifications. We're likely to encounter this every time the forum software is updated, but we have a note in place to make sure to reapply our change in the future.

[Mark Schaffer]

The old behaviour has indeed made another successful comeback. Thanks Alan!