As we all heard, you now get notified about changes in favourite questions. That is certainly an improvement, but I don't think it remedies the issue of comment notifications, because it notifies about favourited questions only.
When you're active on SO a lot, when you see an unclear question, you add a comment asking for clarification. Those questions are almost never favourite material, but you are usually somewhat interested and might return to the question to give an answer.
My argument has been that newbies are not able to figure out that they need to add @username
to their responses to reach the asker, and that we need a notification system that takes this into account.
I just saw such a case - I had left a comment, never received a reply and stumbled across the question again by accident - and decided to compile a list, from today's activity list only, of occurrences where I left a comment, the OP answered but did not think to address me directly, and I thus forgot the question, and would have never returned to it.
Evidence:
- Wordpress Re-usable Custom Widget
- Saving a jpeg with PHP sent from flash
- Need help unformatting text
- š and other char not visible
- Elmah sends error mail on development server, but not on production
One of those users even has 1.2k reputation!
Now most of these questions got answered competently anyway of course, and they usually do, regardless whether a specific user gets reached or not, and I was probably happier not to receive the replies and do more actual work, but this is still not how it should be, is it?
When you add a comment to a question asking for clarification, you are very likely capable of answering that question, and that is a potential that shouldn't be wasted.
As such, I don't feel the marking of this feature request, for example, as status-completed
is justified. It would provide a means to subscribe to questions that are not favourites. I'm not saying that exact feature request needs to be fulfilled 1:1 but something needs to happen. I still think Facebook-like commenting - everyone in a thread gets notified - would be the easiest way to fix this.
I realize this is a triple-dupe, but I wanted to resurrect this explicitly, seeing as so much has been marked completed
with the favourite change. Feel free to close if you feel otherwise.
If you don't: What do you think? What does your "recent activity" list look like, and do you have a comparable number of missed answers?