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Hi, after a users leaves a comment with EE he gets notified of each individual new comment. Even if he has not visited the entry to look at a new comment yet, he still gets email about all other new comments…

So scenario: Philipe leaves a comment, he goes to school next day, in meantime 10 other comments are placed… Then Philipe returns home and finds 10 identical notification emails in his inbox (if his email provider hasn’t already blocked them). Then Philipe thinks, wtf, what’s up with this website harrasing me with many identical emails. Result: Philipe hits the spam button.

Have I missed something? I know there are Smart Notifications for the forum, but what about the comment system? Without it I can not run a website of any scale because when comments add up fast I’m destined to end up marked as a spammer.

No, no smart notification for comments.

I suspect the issue is with the forum you have a member account so EE can keep track of what you’ve viewed and not viewed.  Comments can be left by visitors with no member account.

That said, 8 years of this functionality and I’ve never known it to be an issue.  People get unsubscribe links in each comment notification.  And frankly, comment traffic across all my sites is way down over what it used to be.

Hi Boyink, what about cookies, can’t smart notifications be handled with cookies also somehow?

Comment traffic being down on your site is not really relevant to me. There are enough sites that you could set as examples that get many many comments where this kind of notification behavior would be undesirable. I’m not yet at that point myself, but it is my aim.

Cookies would probably work, but then there is the whole European Cookie Legislation thing to think about there as well.

For me it boils down to:

- Users are self-selecting into this by clicking a checkbox that says ‘email me when new comments are posted’.
- They are given an unsubscribe link in each of those emails.
- In years of working with comments on websites using pMachine or EE I’ve never seen this be an issue.

I think you’re worrying about something that won’t happen.

However you can always post a feature request, or investigate alternate commenting systems like Disqus.

Thanks for the input on this one, Mike!

Jan, Mike makes a lot of good points here. While there’s always the possibility for improvement with software (and we’d encourage making a feature request!), we’ve not seen this become an actual concern for anyone yet, and the way comment notifications work hasn’t changed in many, many years. As Mike noted, there are also third-party commenting solutions like Disqus that you could try.