[DavidTC]

That is why I encourage everyone to use email notifications and even added a feature to pull update URLs from email for you.

The problem there is that requires people to make an account on every site, and it also is a lot more work to set up for each work vs. just dragging a URL into the window. (Which you still *also* have to do.)

It would be amazing if there was some site where, when visiting, there was a button that said 'Email me this story URL right now, and also email me when the story updates', but that doesn't seem to exist. I have to go into the story (as opposed to just dragging it from the URL) and subscribe, and then *also* drag the URL into fanficfare.

(I guess it might be possible to find the monitored stories page and try to grab all the URLs on that page to add the new stories I subscribed to, but that would update all existing stories, defeating the point of not doing mass updates!)

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That said..when talking about server load, I'm not entirely sure that sending an email is less load than loading a page, if the checking is sane and spaced out. That seems like the sort of assumptions about load it is easy to make from the outside, but could be entirely wrong.

If people were psychic and *only* checked for new updates *when* there was a new update, checking is less load than emails. (Obviously, as the email results in a check anyway.) Whereas checking every minute is obviously more load than notification emails.

So there is *some* crossover point, and I rather suspect it's actually a lot more biased against email than people suspect. Web servers are usually pretty damn efficient, whereas email introduces an entirely different server process managing a mail queue, and having to deal with all sorts of other internet servers in handing them mail.

And it's easy to assume that email notifications were introduced as a way to reduce load, but we don't know that. Email notifications might only exist for *user convenience*, not as an attempt to reduce load. It's entirely possible they're more load on average than sane checking behavior. (As in, for example, only stories with at least a 5% chance of having been updated since last check.)

And, honestly, if they really wanted to reduce load, the bigger sites would introduce some sort of Last-Modified header so you could just do a HEAD request, or some XML method, or something. The fact no site has stepped forward with some sort of 'Hey, we'll build you a quick way to check if the story is modified if you'll implement that, to reduce our load' rather implies they don't really care.

They'll block people who are crazy hammering on their server sometimes, yes, but honestly, I've been searching on AO3 before, opening tabs left and right, using a Chrome extension to copy all tabs to the clipboard, pasting them in Fanficfare, downloading three or four dozen stories, and never had a complaint or anything.

tl;dr - I think you might be worrying too much about mass updates...well, except for the whole 'I am going to select every book in my library and run the update over night' or nonsense like that. (Which for some reason you...allow? At least, I got to the point of being able to click Ok, although I didn't. Shouldn't there be some numeric limit on that?)

So I encourage you take it as a victory that you got last-touch, rather than a defeat that I'm saying 'no' to the rest.

Oh, I'm good, I was suggesting that more for other people, not for me. The rest of the stuff was pretty complicated. I already have a pretty good manual system that mostly worked, and this will make sure I don't completely skip ever updating some stuff ever.

I was just saying, if you're concerned about mass updates getting out of hand and pounding servers: Implement some easy-to-use slow-motion mass update thing that *isn't* out of hand. Or not. Whatever. _I'm_ good either way.

And...Last Touch? No offense, but that's a really confusing name. At least 'Last Checked'.