Why Vanilla cannot be a listserv

Vanilla Forums
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in Product

[republishing of a 2013 email I sent to sales]

This is to clarify our current technical capabilities for VanillaPop and our notification system.

VanillaPop is the system by which folks who would get normal notifications for a discussion or comment instead get sent the full text and can reply over email.

Advanced Notifications is a special permission for moderators and admins that allows them to receive email notifications for every new discussion or comment on a per-category basis. We advise clients to never grant this permission to their general membership because it does not scale currently. A dozen folks is OK; 500 is not.

Because of that scaling issue, these 2 features cannot be combined to make Vanilla into a listserv replacement for a large group.

Currently, Vanilla sends notifications synchronously. That means when a post is submitted, it must send every email before the page reloads. If this takes more than 30 seconds (as when trying to send hundreds of notifications), the request will timeout. Even if it takes a little less, it is a bad experience and can cause duplicates because of resubmissions.

We're currently in the planning stages of building a memory queue that will make the notification sending asynchronous and remove this bottleneck. However, there is no ETA on it yet.

So: Vanilla cannot effectively replace a listserv of more than a few dozen folks currently.

Luc added this:

  1. Lincoln did not say that VanillaPOP and our regular notifications
    do not work properly right now. Both those features are just fine
    when used as intended. The only legitimate use for Advanced
    Notifications is if you are the admin of a brand new forum that is
    starting from absolute zero.

  2. What to say to people who want us to replace a listserv.

Listservs are great for things like small simple-topic groups or for
broadcasting of time sensitive messages. There are lots of free or
low costs listserv products out there like Google Groups and Mailman.

The problems with a listserve is that it doesn't scale well.

  • If it gets too busy, people tune out or unsubscribe when their
    mailbox gets inundated with messages.

  • If you want to break out the list into many categories, you now need
    multiple lists

  • There's no good way to search the archive. You're not building a
    knowledge base.

  • There's no SEO benefits

  • You can't give people status or reward them (Like Ranks and badges)
  • You can't have a lively back and forth between a sub-set of members
    without annoying the rest of the list with a million emails. I.e.
    participation is subdued by the fact that you know you're going to be
    spamming everyone on the list.

A forum lets people manage their own email notification settings and
with VanillaPOP enabled, lets them post by email.

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