About a year ago, I set all new members to automatically “Subscribe to This Thread”. A lot of members will post and never return. Maybe their question was answered somewhere else, or maybe they just forgot. Recently, I noticed myself subscribing to threads at other forums and realized I wasn’t visiting those forums nearly as often because the replies to my threads were being included in the email. For example, here’s a topic subscription from EarnersForum, notice the reply is actually in the email itself:
Dear skyhawk133,
Bryan Le has just replied to a thread you have subscribed to entitled – What are you getting your mods for the holidays? – in the Online Communities forum of Earners Forum.
This thread is located at:
http://www.earnersforum.com/showthread.php?t=9282&goto=newpost
Here is the message that has just been posted:
***************
Wow! I think it’s great that you care so much for your mods.
Got any openings? hehe, jk.
***************
There may be other replies also, but you will not receive any more notifications until you visit the forum again.
All the best,
Earners Forum
If I didn’t know better, I would assume that was the only reply and I wouldn’t bother returning to the site. So, to solve this, I took out the “reply” portion of the email and just left the link to the thread and some link to other parts of my site. This forces the user to return to my site to get the reply. Here is what my “Topic Subscription” email looks like now:
skyhawk133,
absta has just posted a reply to a topic that you have subscribed to titled “Introduce Yourself”.
The topic can be found here:
http://forums.dreamincode.net/index.php?showtopic=18938&view=getnewpost
If you have configured in your control panel to recieve immediate topic reply notifications, you may receive an
email for each reply made to this topic. Otherwise, only 1 email is sent per board visit for each subscribed topic.
This is to limit the amount of mail that is sent to your inbox.
Check out the rest of Dream.In.Code:
Programming Help: http://forums.dreamincode.net/showforum76.htm
Introduce Yourself: http://forums.dreamincode.net/showforum65.htm
Caffeine Lounge: http://forums.dreamincode.net/showforum1.htm
Code Snippets: http://code.dreamincode.net/
Job Listings: http://home.dreamincode.net/?p=careercenter
Tutorials: http://tutorials.dreamincode.net/
Developer Blogs: http://forums.dreamincode.net/?automodule=blog
In the short time since I made this change, I’ve noticed an increase in new members returning to the site and becoming more active. Fewer “drive bys”, more active members.
Hope this helps!
by Chris Kenworthy @ Ackfoo.com
Cool beans man Now All I need to do is figure out how to do that with my board’s phpbb2 then again I dont even get the drive by’s I just get spam bots.
Chris,
Thanks for this good tidbit. I will try it out.
Great insight! This looks very logical to me now.
I absolutely hate forum admins who defaulty enable automatic thread subscriptions. I never realize I’m suscribed until the next day when I have 50 subscription emails in my inbox.
On one side I’m with Matt on this one. I also get annoyed when this happens automatically. (I’d like an RSS feed instead, though I’d probably forget subscribing)
But then again, I’ve set up the exact same feature on a couple of forums before, and they seems to work wonders!
Here are those tips, plus a few others that I put together a few months ago:
http://www.vbseo.com/f34/get-users-register-keep-them-coming-back-4654/
I know exactly what you are talking about. I too get the replies in the email so I dont always go to that thread and read the rest of the posts. But I’m always on that site so I will eventually read the rest of the posts.
Nino
Really good points. I know that I’ve noticed since I upgraded my vbulletin software the page views were lower than before the upgrade. This was a mystery to me since the other traffic stats seemed normal.
Then I realized: Prior to upgrade the email notifies did not contain the text of the reply. This forced the members to return to read their replies and encourage them to continue to participate.
I’ve removed the reply content and am watching now to see if the page views returns to “normal”.
[...] But it wasn’t until I read Chris Kentworthy’s post here that I realized here was one issue that could make a profound difference. [...]