TechRepublic appears to have changed the form of its email alerts for discussions to which I’ve subscribed. This has created a few problems for me, in large part because of the interaction of the facts that:
A) I use email alerts almost exclusively as my point of entry to TechRepublic.
B) The change was poorly handled, from where I’m sitting.
The problems with how it was implemented, as I see it, are the following:
1. I don’t remember any announcement that the formats of the emails would be so significantly changed. I had no idea I was about to start getting such almost unrecognizably different email alerts.
2. Every single one of my subscriptions defaulted to (X)HTML emails in the new format, despite the fact that my email alerts had previously been delivered with plain text so that I could read them easily in my text-only email client setup (which, by the way, provides excellent protection against malicious code in emails). The only way to change the alerts to plain text was to mark them as plain text and submit the changes, [b]one individual discussion subscription at a time[/b]. I’m subscribed to hundreds of discussions, and they don’t seem to be in any kind of logical order that would help me pick out the most important discussions first (or even the most active).
3. The organization of the new format for email alerts is atrocious for purposes of parsing quickly and making decisions about what to read at the site. The full text of replies appearing in my inbox slows down my ability to deal with discussion activity to a point where it’s effectively impossible, and assumes that I have a photographic memory for the context within which a given reply might appear.
I have never found the on-site tools for keeping up with discussions very useful for me. Now, the email alerts are suffering the same problem. I sent a message via the “Site Help & Feedback” page, to which I have not received a response. Of course, this may simply be a function of having encountered this problem with the beginning of the weekend, but I ultimately felt it was necessary — because people have already indicated to me that they wonder why I haven’t responded to discussions here at TR — to say something publicly to explain my current, and possibly long-term, absence from TR discussions.
Jaqui, who many remember fondly here, was “forced out” by the fact that TR requires JavaScript on many pages of the site now, thus causing him to make a choice between continued participation in the TR community and using the software he prefers — and now I’m facing a similar choice, except that in my case it’s a choice between continued participating and having any time left in the day to do anything else, unless this problem is only temporary. The relative value of the two options that seem to be available to me should be fairly obvious.
Hopefully I’m not overlooking an obvious solution, and hopefully this isn’t goodbye. If it is goodbye, however — it has been a fun ride, while it lasted.
I’ll try to remember to check this thread from time to time in the near future, the old-fashioned way, but don’t bet money on it.
