On Sun, 20 Feb 2005 14:59:53 +0100, Thomas Gries mail@tgries.de wrote:
but for me it's significantly harder to receive every message as a notice in my inbox
_One_ email notification is sent once the page, you are watching, is changed by someone else than you. Further changes do not trigger.
I think Kate's point was not about how many notifications, but about the difference between being notified that a change has been made, and actually reading the message directly. Using a mailing-list subscription, or a newsgroup viewer, there are 2 steps to reading the message: 1) pick the conversation you want to read (by its subject) 2) read the messages therein With a mail-notifying discussion forum *of any kind*, there are 3: 1) pick the conversation 2) follow the link in the notification 3) read the message This would make it significantly *harder* to "browse" a large number of discussions, because you would be constantly switching between mail-client and browser, and you would be less able to use additional features of your client to deal with the discussions in ways that suited you personally.
What's more, the "receive one notif and then no more" feature is actually something of a *disadvantage*, because (if I understand rightly) it removes the behaviour common on traditional threaded environments of new posts "bumping" a thread, even if it is a reply to something that happened a long time ago. If you go away, don't check the notifications, and come back, you will not know which are still active.
Please don't think I'm criticising your work on eNotif *in general*, but with the general consensus being that discussions on MediaWiki leave something to be desired anyway, I don't see that just having this one enhancement suddenly makes them better than longer established mediums *for the same purpose*.