Many of our Discourse users rely on email alerts for new topics, for new replies to topics they have created or replied to themselves, and similar. Unfortunately, the size of this Discourse now means that we are well beyond the email sending capacity of our Discourse plan. Although we could upgrade to a more expensive plan with higher email capacity, the next plan up from our current one is unfortunately well beyond our financial means. Maintaining the current state is also not workable as emails often stop being sent part-way through the month.
As a result, we unfortunately have to revise how we use Discourse’s email functions. We are going to be revising the email settings to try and cut back the number of emails sent by default. We do want users to be able to receive alerts for things like replies to topics they are interested in, but in order to achieve this we will need to turn off many of the firehoses that are currently on.
If you are used to receiving email alerts as your way of interacting with Discourse, please check your settings and try to narrow the scope of emails you receive. It is better to subscribe to just the few categories you are interested in than to everything - especially with the upcoming category changes.
If you receive email alerts even though you habitually check Discourse directly even without them, then we ask you to please disable any alerts you don’t need. This will free up capacity for people who do need email alerts.
If you have any questions, please reply to this topic. We will keep it updated with the actions we take so you will know to review your settings if something you rely on changes.
Pro tip: you can also just subscribe to this RSS feed in your RSS reader : ROS Discourse - Latest topics (and there might exist some RSS-to-email service out there if you really prefer email). These RSS links also exist for specific categories, e.g., ROS Projects - ROS Discourse.
Y’all do use RSS, right?
Speaking of RSS feeds, I also recommend this custom HackerNews filter RSS feed I’ve “put together”, which covers everything robot/robotics that gets posted on HackerNews. It’s a great way to stay up to date without bias or ads: HackerNews robot/robots/robotics. If you only want to see “good” ones, i.e., posts that have already received more than 5 upvotes, you can add &points=5 to that URL.
Although my settings show that I only want weekly updates, I’m getting emails at least daily for new posts to discourse.ros.org. Any hints on how to reduce it to just weekly summaries? Thanks!
For some time now I’ve been considering moving ROS News to a more formal e-mail newsletter. It sounds like now would be a good time to re-visit that effort so we can send out a weekly summary of Discourse post outside of the existing Discourse e-mail framework.
I am on the road here for another week but I’ll start concocting a plan over the next few weeks.
Similar to @Bernd_Pfrommer I get emails for every single topic which is posted, not just ones I participate in. I definitely could be holding it wrong but I don’t recall changing any default notification settings. My notification counter next to my icon on the site also shows notifications for every single topic on the site. So I wonder if maybe some default setting is flooding everyone with notifications/emails and y’all could save some by changing the defaults or something.
