Suggestion Option to be notified if certain words/phrases are used in a post.

[Mercury]

This is a question as much as a suggestion since I have no idea if it would even be possible and if so, how feasible it would be to implement. I think a useful feature would be if you could "subscribe" to certain words or phrases and that if they were used in a thread title or post, you would be notified about it. Say you are interested in "time Vortex manipulators" and you could subscribe to that phrase then every time that was used in a thread title or post, you would be notified even if it was swept off the front pages. Certain common words would have to be excluded of course to prevent stuff that had no bearing on what a person might be interested in as well as to prevent overloading the system. Anyway, just curious on the feasibility of it and if so, how many would be interested in that option.

 

[Art Andrews]

We have recently hired on a company that might be able to do just that kind of thing. This is far beyond my meager skills and it would be pretty low on the list compared to a lot of other areas that are really suffering right now, but I think this would be a GREAT idea!

 

[Mercury]

Cool! Sounds Great :thumbsup

 

[exoray]

The easiest quick and dirty option would be to simply enable RSS syndication on the forum for each day, and then filter the RSS feed on your end based on your keyword criteria... The RSS feed option is already built into vBulletin so there isn't even a hack or anything needed it just needs to be enabled and configured...

With a program like FeedReader (Free RSS reader / RSS platform for enterprise grade solutions | Feedreader.com) it's just a matter of using FeedReaders built in SmartFeed option to filter the incoming RSS feed from the forum by keyword, and show the relevant topics... I have no first hand experience on how well this reader actually filters and RSS data but it claims to do it... There are probably 1001 other RSS readers that will offer the same type of filtering or even better... Or a custom app could be created without much hassle, as it's only text searching of a text document, so a simple PHP or Javascript on your end could perform the necessary filtering and display them for you...

Individual subscriptions on the server end could really burden the server, at least IMO, filtering on your end from a generic daily RSS feed is a lot more efficient, and offers more flexibility...

 

[Art Andrews]

Flynn, you make some great points, as usual. As I said, it is something low on the list, and in the meantime, your solution is certainly viable, but after we get a number of other things fixed, I'll be glad to have our team take a look and give their thoughts. Although now that you brought up the issue of server load, that might be a determining factor.

 

[exoray]

Although now that you brought up the issue of server load, that might be a determining factor.

It always is, I'm real surprised that we are still seeing the server issues (although A LOT better), I have been part of staff at a forums that dwarfed this forum in size and member count running vBulletin and don't recall any load issues...

But stuff like tailored subscriptions will certainly add immediate load to any server, so I like to avoid them unless necessary... The more CPU crunching you can pass off to the client end is good for the server...

 

[Art Andrews]

It always is, I'm real surprised that we are still seeing the server issues (although A LOT better), I have been part of staff at a forums that dwarfed this forum in size and member count running vBulletin and don't recall any load issues...

We do still seem to be battling some issues here which is part of the reason we have hired on a group to take a look at things like this. Our funds are very limited so it is only limited support but we want to provide a more and more professional grade of service as we continue to grow. While we now have resources that are far superior to some of those in the past, we are still growing at such a rate that we seem to still be outgrowing the resources that we have, especially when we are hit with a stumbleupon or facebook influx. I know a good bit in general about servers and such, but it has gotten to a point where it is above my skill-set, so we are bringing in some outside help that will hopefully eventually get things like this resolved.