Suggestions for improvements to the free books email -

larkim

05 Oct 2012, 10:03 AM | Post: #1

Member

Posts: 60
Joined: Jun 2011

Thanked 0 times

Suggestions for improvements to the free books email

Just a few thoughts after receiving the emails for quite a while now (and benefiting from some interesting reading along the way!).

Ordering - I'm not ashamed to be dipping into the odd freebie erotica from time to time, but unfortunately it alphabetically comes at the top of my email. Any chance either than a) that section could be de-prioritised and sent to the bottom (ooer, missus) or b) in generally allow users to change the order of the categories that they receive?

Quality / size filters - I note that the free books listing on the web-page allows a filter to exclude some of the shorter stuff. Could this be applied to the mailing list too, so that I'm not swamped with free short stories? Also, it would be good if I could only receive updates for books where, say, 10 people had made a review and / or the review "score" was over 4.0?

I'm sure these are things you've already thought of, and I know they are just requests based on my own laziness, but thought I'd voice them anyway!

Matt

Find

Thank (0)

Reply

Lou Reading Ryria Series by Michael J Sullivan

05 Oct 2012, 10:13 AM | Post: #2

Administrator

Posts: 4,575
Joined: Aug 2010

Thanked 49 times

What I Read

RE: Suggestions for improvements to the free books email

Hi Matt,

Thanks for your feedback.

I can definitely look into the erotica option (ie moving it to the bottom), but for some of the other things, they may be very difficult for technical reasons.

Filtering the results is not a problem, but doing filtering whilst generating over 6,000 emails (at present) will have a huge impact. If you can imagine that the filtering, compilation and queueing and delivery takes say 2 seconds to process in total, that could mean that the last mails go out over 3 hours later than normal. As the mailing list grows, this would become even longer, not to mention the load on the server. At the moment, when a mail is generated, it's cached so that for someone with the same settings it doesn't need to be re-generated. If you add too many settings into the mix, that becomes impossible because of the sheer number of permutations.

I'd be happy to evaluate the possibility of more advanced filtering, but whilst technically it's possible, my guess is that logistically it couldn't work.

Barnacle Boy! We have to find those stolen Naggy Daddies!

Find

Thank (0)

Reply

larkim

05 Oct 2012, 10:19 AM | Post: #3

Member

Posts: 60
Joined: Jun 2011

Thanked 0 times

RE: Suggestions for improvements to the free books email

(05 Oct 2012 10:13 AM)Lou Wrote: Hi Matt,

Thanks for your feedback.

I can definitely look into the erotica option (ie moving it to the bottom), but for some of the other things, they may be very difficult for technical reasons.

Filtering the results is not a problem, but doing filtering whilst generating over 6,000 emails (at present) will have a huge impact. If you can imagine that the filtering, compilation and queueing and delivery takes say 2 seconds to process in total, that could mean that the last mails go out over 3 hours later than normal. As the mailing list grows, this would become even longer, not to mention the load on the server. At the moment, when a mail is generated, it's cached so that for someone with the same settings it doesn't need to be re-generated. If you add too many settings into the mix, that becomes impossible because of the sheer number of permutations.

I'd be happy to evaluate the possibility of more advanced filtering, but whilst technically it's possible, my guess is that logistically it couldn't work.

Cheers, I appreciate the quick reply - and I understand the issues with the techy stuff too!

Matt

Find

Thank (0)

Reply