How Discogs' email notification could be improved

I think it is time for another usability rant. Although I myself am far from a usability expert (the best courses I took at university were about usability that taught me to stay far away from it) I do suffer from user interfaces with quirks and Discogs is no exception.

I have written about this subject before (images, data entry, etc.) but it bites me and my friend gerjolp every time we are on Discogs. While editing releases for correctness (such as the depósito legal fixes described an an earlier post) where people made snarky remarks about whether or not we didn't have anything better to do. This was a bit strange, as the data for the releases is more complete now and this should be encouraged.

My guess is that the real reason is not that the releases were edited but the fact that Discogs sends a notification e-mail for every change that is made and some people got hundreds of e-mails with all an identical message about a similar change in many releases. Instead of flagging it with Discogs saying "could you please change your mail blast system" they started complaining to the person making the changes. Basically they were saying "please stop improving the data, because I am getting too many e-mails", which can be discouraging.

The real solution of course would be to fix the way notifications are sent in Discogs, although I wouldn't know how it can be improved. I could imagine that something like an hourly digest could work.

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SID codes (part 1)

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Vinyl & Data

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