So your design would work. There is a problem, though: the usual workflow is to check email first and then click on links back to Wikidot sites.

I have an idea…

I have a question. I never log myself out — meaning that when I turn my computer back on, and open my browser, I'm still logged in, which is exactly the way I like it.

Does this mean that if I have the "Intelligent" option selected, all emails will be sent individually? If that is the case, I'd like to suggest a slightly different approach.

When a notification event is fired:

• If the user loaded a page within the last 30 minutes, send an individual email for the notification
• If the user's last page load was 31 minutes ago or longer, start queuing notifications

So, if I went out for a few hours and got back home to find that I had only a handful of notifications¹, all I'd have to do is to load up www.wikidot.com and wait for my single email (containing all notifications for the past few hours) to arrive in my inbox.

If I decide that I'm not going to load up Wikidot, then notifications continue queuing up until when they are due to be sent out, e.g. 12:00 GMT

Is this feasible?

• about updates to…
  • [_] only pages I select (no auto-watching) | [_] pages/threads I've created | etc etc

Incorporating Shane's first comment on 5 Aug, what about options like this:

• Send me notifications…
  • [_] once per week | [_] once per day | [_] in real time
• about updates to…
  • [_] pages/threads I've created | [_] pages/threads I've edited | [_] the entire site
• by means of…
  • [_] internal personal message | [_] rss feed | [_] email

Within each line, the options increase from least intrusive to most intrusive (most immediate); except for the last line, where notice on multiple venues is theoretically possible, the options within each line are logically exclusive from each other. (As you move to the right, you render options to the left redundant.)

I don't like the idea of removing functionality which already exists…

:-) It's a tradition in the design section. I propose to remove something. Everyone complains. Finally I add it back. Meanwhile other evil things get in and no-one notices.

More seriously, this seems like a "Break notifications y/n?" option that is just asking for trouble. Unchecking that basically means "nothing works".

And it does not do what users want, which is "stop sending me emails, PLEASE". What it does is "stop new subscriptions from now on but leave all existing ones there", which is a useless feature.

For digests, you're probably right that it makes no sense to allow both digests and individual emails.

• [_] Individually, by email
• [_] Once per day, by email

These two are mutually exclusive. It should not be possible to select both at the same time.

We propose to remove the "send me a copy" option because in practice this is not useful. Notifications are not a record of activity, this is what the wiki threads are for.

I don't like the idea of removing functionality which already exists…