Simon Willison’s Weblog

Comment Notification

21st April 2003

Keith is calling for bloggers to implement a “notify me of any replies” feature for their comments systems:

There are a few ways to do this. You could get an e-mail for every reply that’s made, but that could quickly flood you with e-mail. It doesn’t scale well, and I guarantee you messages are harder to put in context this way. The better solution, and the one that message boards use, is to e-mail you when there’s a new post made, but then not e-mail you again until you’ve visited the site and seen all the new posts. This scales better.

I like it. It’s a relatively simple feature to implement with instant, obvious benefits. I’ll try and work on this some time this week.