New notification suggestion?

[An Old Head 4,815]

I've been thinking about a certain feature that could be added and how it would be pretty useful. My suggestion is to allow us a new notification option where we can enter a certain phrase, and then we get a notification whenever someone creates a post with that phrase in it.

 

For instance, if I were to enter "Pinkie Pie" into this feature and hit OK, I would receive notifications from then on whenever someone makes a post with the words "Pinkie Pie" in it, with a link to that post, like "Feld0 mentioned the phrase "Pinkie Pie" in a post."

 

I think this would be a super useful addition, and hopefully easy to implement/a feature that is within this forum type. It would allow us to get right into a discussion about that query, and it means we don't have to search for our query every time we think it might have appeared. I know it's just a convenience and isn't urgent, but I - and I'm sure a lot of us - would love this to be a thing.

 

Thanks for reading. n.n

[Leafeon 2,701]

I don't think this would be worth the labor it sounds like it would take. I don't think this would actually be that useful, personally.

[Champion RD92 8,654]

That sounds pretty cool actually, but I don't know if it would be worth the trouble of creating this feature :/

[Retro*Derpy 3,081]

Well, it seems like quite a bit of work for something that isn't so needed. Why not just follow a topic that has a lot of those phrases in it, rather than just notifying a specific phrase? I mean its a colorful idea, but what are you going to do when you get a thread like "spam pinkie pie"? Your notifications will skyrocket.

[NavelColt 22,876]

Well, it seems like quite a bit of work for something that isn't so needed. Why not just follow a topic that has a lot of those phrases in it, rather than just notifying a specific phrase? I mean its a colorful idea, but what are you going to do when you get a thread like "spam pinkie pie"? Your notifications will skyrocket.

 

>Lots of work for Scoots

>Just to get notifications spammed up where the sun doesn't shine

 

This is basically what this translates to, yeah You can follow topics, you can use the search feature (which we're trying to improve by fixing the tagging system by the way; if the tag system got fixed, you could click a 'Pinkie Pie' tag and find all threads sharing that tag), and more or less just accomplish what such a suggestion would do for you, times ten.

[Key Gear 6,662]

>Lots of work for Scoots

I love it when people think about me! 

 

Actually though… I looked up how this could be done, just for the fun of it, and it wouldn't be too difficult from a code perspective. But, the notification spam would redefine notification spam. We need to think about something… There are over 3000 posts per day on this site. If you get a notification every time someone mentions Pinkie Pie, then you would probably receive hundreds and hundreds of notifications every single day. That would be pretty brutal punishment.

 

Then, there's another problem… If you actually have a feature like this and lots of people use it, then you have the potential to generate the following maximum number of sitewide notifications per day:

 

10,000 members x 3000 posts per day x Number of notifications

 

If you assume that each person has about five notification set up, then that gives you a total of 150 million notifications each day. That means over 4 billion per month. We have a pretty good server, but Feld0 would excommunicate me if we had a database table that grew that quickly…

 

So, yeah... This is a good idea, but you are probably better off using the search function for now.