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notification emails

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Josef Rogovsky
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Josef Rogovsky asked on 30 Nov 2005, 04:35 PM
Specifically the emails I receive to notify me of thread activity or a response to a support request...

Some of them list posts in ascending order and some of them list posts in descending order.

It would be nice if all the notification emails were consistent.

Personally, I like to see them listed from newest to oldest.

Anyone else also find this to be a minor annoyance?

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Zhivko Dimitrov
Telerik team
answered on 01 Dec 2005, 05:21 PM
Hi Josef,

Thank you for bringing this up! We are aware of the discrepancy and it is by design - we thought that forum visitors would often be reading a thread for the first time long after it has a long history of messages and would find it more intuitive to start with the first message in the thread and follow the messages in historical order. This is why we have set up the threads to display messages in ascending order for our forums and accordingly, for the e-mail notifications that you receive. In our support system, however, people are already familiar with the messages history and would expect to read first the latest reply from our Support Officers - that is why we display the messages in descending order, with the latest on top. We release this might be confusing and would like to hear visitor's opinion on the issue - would you strictly prefer one of the approaches before the other or is the discrepancy tolerable in view of the different contexts?

Kind regards,
Zhivko Dimitrov
the telerik team
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Shaun Peet
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answered on 03 Dec 2005, 02:06 PM
Actually I don't mind the way it is.  I can tell right away when I get the email whether or not the thread was responded to by a member of the telerik team because that will be the top post.  My vote is to keep it the way it is.
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Josef Rogovsky
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answered on 03 Dec 2005, 08:07 PM
I have to admit that it always takes me a moment to figure out the context of the email.

Perhaps a compromise... When a notification is regarding a support ticket, let's keep the "from address display name" the same ("Support | telerik"). But when an email is regarding a post to a forum thread would it be possible for the "from address display name" to be something else, like "Forums | telerik"?

That little change would make things a lot clearer for me.
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Zhivko Dimitrov
Telerik team
answered on 05 Dec 2005, 02:54 PM
Hi Josef,

Your suggestion sounds great and we are definitely implementing it! It's on our todo list and I hope we will see it live in a matter of days. Thank you for the involvement, it really helps us deliver more.

Kind regards,
Zhivko Dimitrov
the telerik team
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Todd Anglin
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answered on 05 Sep 2006, 09:14 PM
Wow! I didn't realize this had been discussed o so long ago.

Josef took the words right of my mouth with his original post (almost). When we get email notifications from the forums, the messages are listed oldest to newest if the "general community" responds and newest to oldest if Telerik responds. And if I understand correctly, this inconsistency in the forums is by design.

I'd like to plead the case for always ordering messages in forum emails from newest to oldest. Two reasons:

  1. I don't know about a year ago, but today it seems that most threads and addressed and closed within the first week. That means when you get an email, you already aware of the issue and you don't need to review the full conversation history to see what's going on.
  2. More importantly, ordering the messages from oldest to newest makes it VERY hard to view them on a mobile device (such as a BlackBerry). Most mobile devices that get email fetch the first x bytes and have to be told to fetch the rest. If the thread you're dealing with is very long (like some can be), it's a huge pain to download the whole message and thumb wheel all the way down just to see the new reply. It would be much more convenient to have the new messages on top.

I would expect the situations where someone gets an email from a forum they participated in "so long ago they can't recall the context" are rare (though I know they do happen occasionally). Much more common is the back and forth replies that happen over a couple of days, and the current email format makes that exchange cumbersome.

Any chance we can revisit this issue? Any other MVPs have a different opinion about the forum emails?

Thanks~

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Jimmy Stuart
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answered on 06 Sep 2006, 12:41 AM
I would also vote for newest to oldest always.  I have given up trying to read many of the emails from the forum on my Blackberry.  If they have more than a couple of responses it takes forever to wait on the Blackberry to keep downloading every time you scroll down.
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Todd Anglin
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answered on 06 Sep 2006, 03:49 PM
Thanks for the input Jimmy. Glad to hear someone else is trying to read these emails on a BlackBerry. =)

One thing I forgot to mention in my first post: sometimes the emails I get from the forums include the responses as an attachment. This behavior seems random since I have participated in some very long forum threads that never sent emails with the replies as an attachment and some very short ones that have.

The attachments are worse than the oldest to newest ordering because they are completely unavailable on my mobile client. At least with oldest to newest messages can be viewed (if you have enough patience to wait on the full thread to download). Perhaps telerik can provide some clarification on what causes a forum email to send replies as attachments instead of in the email body.

Thanks~
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Josef Rogovsky
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answered on 06 Sep 2006, 07:00 PM
FWIW, I've never seen responses come in as attachments.

I don't know if that's a feature or a random glitch but in all my telerik forum activity I've never seen at attachment.

I use Outlook.
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Todd Anglin
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answered on 06 Sep 2006, 07:05 PM
Josef,

That makes all the stranger. I use Outlook too, by the way.

Currently, all emails I get for responses to this thread come as attachments. Maybe you can subscribe and let me know if you experience the same thing.

Thanks~
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Natalie Farah
Telerik team
answered on 07 Sep 2006, 11:42 AM
Hello,

I am not sure if the idea to switch the order of the message will have a positive effect. I suppose it will become more confusing to have the messages in the email ordered from newest to oldest and the messages in the forum itself ordered the other way round. There should be some consistency between the emails and the forums on the website. At the same time, we cannot reverse the order of the messages in the forums due to the reasons discussed on the at the beginning of this thread.

However, from the last few posts in this forum it seems that most of you are ready to give up the consistency for the ability to read the mails on a BlackBerry. So, if we don't receive some feedback in favor of old messages at the top, we are going to reverse the order in the mails.

Concerning the attachments, this shouldn't happen - all messages should be delivered in the body of the mail. Probably there is some glitch in the system, which we'll investigate and try to fix.

All the best,
Natalie Farah

the telerik team
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Josef Rogovsky
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answered on 07 Sep 2006, 02:52 PM
Hi Todd,

I"ve subscribed to that thread.

Now i'm just waiting for a new message to be posted in it...
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Todd Anglin
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answered on 07 Sep 2006, 05:06 PM
Natalie,

Thanks for considering the change. I think you'd find that most users are okay with their emails being formatted differently than the forums. Emails serve as notifications of new comments, so your goal is usually to quickly read the new comment and decide if it's worth returning to the forums to respond.

I don't think people care (though I could be wrong) that the consistency of the message order is preserved in the email since their goal is not to re-read the entire thread with each new email. Plus, since telerik responses already cause the forum email replies to re-order, this change in behavior will actually provide more consistency in the forum emails.

Finally, if you need me to forward an email to you that has the replies as an attachment for analysis, just let me know.

Thanks~
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Josef Rogovsky
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answered on 07 Sep 2006, 05:17 PM
I don't even think we need to have the entire thread in the email.

Just info on the most recent post and an invitation to return to the forums to see the entire thread and post additional comments.

Every other forum I belong to works that way.
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Jimmy Stuart
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answered on 07 Sep 2006, 06:05 PM
I agree with Josef that having only the latest reply (or 2) would be perfectly fine for the forum emails.  Since we get an email for each reply (which is good), then if you are keeping tabs on that subject/thread then you will have already read the other posts. Besides it might cut down on a little tiny piece of your bandwidth too.
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Todd Anglin
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answered on 07 Sep 2006, 06:09 PM
Couldn't agree more, Josef and Jimmy!

I didn't want to ask for too much change, but I too would be more than happy with only receiving the latest reply in email with a link back to the forum for more.

Thanks~
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Natalie Farah
Telerik team
answered on 08 Sep 2006, 10:30 AM
Hello,

Thank you all for the feedback. I should also agree that including only the last forum post in the email will be the best approach. We'll consider implementing this change as soon as possible.

Best wishes,
Natalie Farah
the telerik team
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Todd Anglin
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answered on 29 Jan 2007, 04:35 PM
Natalie,

I noticed last week that my forum emails started showing up on my BlackBerry in descending post order. Thank you!!! This has been one of the single best changes to the forums in a long time and I really appreciate the attention to this small detail.

Keep up the great work!

Thanks~
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Natalie Farah
Telerik team
answered on 29 Jan 2007, 05:34 PM
Hi Todd,

Thank you for the nice comments. I am grad to see the change that we implemented did in fact turn out to be useful for you. I hope we'll manage to keep up with other requests that we receive from our community and continue improving user experience on our website.

Regards,
Natalie Farah
the telerik team
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Josef Rogovsky
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Zhivko Dimitrov
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Shaun Peet
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Josef Rogovsky
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Todd Anglin
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Jimmy Stuart
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Natalie Farah
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