There have been two primary complaints from the email haters since Postmatic 1 was launched.
The first is that high frequency publishers don’t want to send posts multiple times a day. We’ll get to that one soon. You’re going to love it.
The second is that comment notifications can get overwhelming on active posts. Every time someone adds a new post an email is sent to any subscribers. We addressed this early on with the introduction of Flood Control in Postmatic 1. What it did was simple and effective enough. If there were more than 6 comments in an hour we would pause notifications and shoot everyone an email telling them as much.
The problem of course was that in hour one there could be 5 comments, and another 4 in hour two, and 5 again in hour three. That’s 12 emails waiting for you in the morning. We’re fixing that in the upcoming Postmatic 2.
Flood Control in Postmatic 2
Postmatic keeps track of the conversations surrounding your posts and rates each as hot or cold. All posts start cold and are considered hot if they ever generate more than 6 comments in a 14 hour period. You can adjust that number if you like.
Getting the conversation started…
Notifications of new comments on cold posts happen in realtime. As soon a comment is published any subscribers will get an email immediately.
Keep them talking without killing inboxes
As soon as Postmatic notices a lot of conversation happening Flood Control will kick in. Here is what happens:
- All new comments will be sent to the post author (if author subscriptions are enabled) immediately.
- Comments which are direct replies (Dylan replied to Jason) will trigger an email notification to the person who is being replied to (Jason).
- All other comment notifications will be held back and sent as a single daily digest.
- The daily digest shows new comments as well as what they were in reply to.
- Each comment in the digest has its own reply button to let the recipient send a reply to any comment they want.
Here’s how it looks:
Flood Control 2 makes it possible to use Postmatic on sites of any size. Posts with hundreds of comments are safe to subscribe to at last.
Thanks as always for the awesome team here (Dylan, Elissa, & Ankur) for making this happen.
Flood Control 2 is included in Postmatic 2 Beta 9 (0.4.0) and is available to testers now.