Discussion alerts

This is the latest from TeeBeeDee engineer, GregSherwin:
Apologies for the confusing interface for the time being. When we first launched Group alerts, people who joined a group received alerts not only for new discussions and comments in their chosen discussions, but also for every comment made within any discussion in the same group (wasn't designed that way, which is another story, but that's what came out). A number of users complained loudly that they were overwhelmed by the volume of alerts and that they felt a bit "spammed" by it all.

As we currently have it implemented, the software that supports alerts for non-group discussions currently also runs on the group discussions - and for ALL the discussions in a group. So we had to make a quick decision until we can make and verify the right change. Because the current software leaves it sort of as an all-or-nothing proposition, we decided to temporarily appease the members who felt they were getting too many alerts from groups. Therefore alerts in groups now are only for new discussions, and when you start a discussion, and we know that the current Web site leaves the false impression that you can subscribe to comment alerts within a single group discussion.

This means those who want alerts on comments in groups won't receive them until we come up with a better product solution and some additional software changes. It is definitely a broken user experience, but we opted to error on the side of not overloading users' inboxes. Even if the current language in the group discussions for subscribing to alerts now leaves the wrong impression. We'll definitely be cleaning that up in a future release.

In the meantime, non-group discussion alerts still message on new comments.