[StartHere] Transaction / Account / Enquiry notifications

Steve on 17/08/2007 - 00:09

Hi there,

We're looking at the best method to indicate transaction, account and enquiry changes for your MBC account. At the moment we're having trouble contacting people because I guess they're used to receiving spam when they sign up to services like ours and so the email address they register with is either not checked or very rarely checked.

We are intending to give you a preference option (default: disabled) to enable notifications for changes of state in your transactions, account and enquiries. We see this as particularly useful with regard to enquiries as we often need further information, so if you see a notification change from "Queued" to "Awaiting info" you know to log in and check that enquiry.

We don't spam EVER btw and its up to you if you want to subscribe to our news feed and get the latest deals and offers and we'd actually prefer not to send email notifications out for this new service either, primarily because they'll probably get ignored and we don't want to get our domain black listed for spamming either.

Another solution may be to introduce an RSS feed for each users account which we can update when there are status changes and so you can use your feed reader of choice. The problem we see with that is that it isn't secure (of course plain text email isn't either really) and it MAY be possible for others to see and subscribe to other members' feeds. This probably isn't a particular problem as it won't contain ANY member specific details, just entries like:

"Transaction '2007-08-10 12:56:00' 'DealsDirect.com.au' status change from 'Tracking' to 'Approved'"

or

"Enquiry '20/12/07' 'oo.com.au' status change from 'Queued' to 'Sent to network'"

etc…

First off we wanted to know if you think the notifications will be useful and secondly what preferred method you'd like to see us implement and of course if there are any alternatives to email or RSS feed?

Any feedback much appreciated as always.

Steve.

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Comments

  • r on 17/08/2007 - 00:27

    I don't think the Privacy Act would allow public rss feeds.

    • scotty on 17/08/2007 - 09:56

      True.

      You can do HTTP Basic Authentication on the RSS feed, which requires your MBC username + password to read it. However some web-based RSS readers might not work (Bloglines works, but not Google Reader AFAIK).

      You can also generate obfuscated feed URL (like Google Calendar feed), but obfuscation is never the answer to security :)

      Personally I prefer email notification though, and I think it would be a great feature if users can opt-in or out from email notification.

  • kcyw on 17/08/2007 - 16:11

    I vote for email notification too. That would be really useful instead of having to check every few days to see if there is any change/problem.

  • Steve on 20/08/2007 - 17:57

    Thanks for your comments and suggestions.

    Looks like email notifications will be the way to go, hopefully we'll have this feature in place by the end of this week, keep an eye on our news feed to see exactly when it becomes available.

    Cheers Steve.

  • bamzero on 22/08/2007 - 03:36

    Yep, I agree. email would be the simplest option for me.

  • Steve on 22/08/2007 - 23:28

    OK, email notifications are now available!

    You can now opt to receive email notifications whenever there are changes to your transactions, account or outstanding enquiries.

    By default this new feature is disabled, to enable notifications, log in to your MBC account and change your 'preferences' by ticking the 'Enable email notifications' box.

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