Not receiving deal alerts for some keywords

I changed my shoe alerts that had [men's] to [men] and now I'm getting alerts for [men shoe -running] and [men sneaker -running]. So it must be the apostrophe that's causing it.

I haven't gotten any alerts for [-running @title men shoe] which should have triggered if [men shoe -running] triggered. I don't know if it's because your system won't send duplicate alerts or if the @title modifier isn't actually functioning.

The system will try and remove duplicate deals triggered for the same person if it matches multiple alerts at the same time.

Thanks for the info on men vs men's. I will look into it sometime this week

I made some deal alerts for shoes but haven't been able to receive one shoe deal alert.

Keyword: "men's shoes" -running

I want anything with "men's shoes" in the body except for running shoes. I have it set to +2 rating.
...[snip]...

For men's shoes - running, your best keywords to use would be:
men|mens|"men's" shoe|shoes -running


For deal alert keywords, if there is an apostrophe in the word, it MUST have quotes around that word itself, like so: "men's", or the deal alert may/will fail since the DA system will ignore the apostrophe itself if not surrounded by quotes and will only see the word as mens instead, but not see the word men's or maybe not even just men.

The DA alert system is picky, to help avoid too many alerts say for when a user wants the exact word such as horse but not horses. So it's more exacting in order to trigger alerts but not flood users with stuff they don't want to see. (Years ago SD tried loosening that up a bit but got a lot of complaints about tooo many false alerts, so it got tightened up again at the time, sorry)

That keyword string I gave you above would/should find ANY thread that says men's, men or mens and also shoe or shoes, in any order in the OP's post or title of a thread, but not a thread that also says running too.

Never put quotes around a keyword string that you don't want to be an exact phrase search, such as "men's shoes", because that will force the deal alert system to ONLY look for that exact phrase and ignore any thread that doesn't say the words Men's Shoes exactly in that order together. So men's Hoka shoes would be ignored for example if using "men's shoes" with quotes around both words together.

Also the DA system does not pick up on 'stemming' (e.g. extra letters such as an 's' added to the base word 'shoe') for words, such as shoes [plural] if you put shoe [singular] as the keyword. So for this thread that you mentioned for example, the OP said shoes, not shoe, so the deal alert for [men shoe -running] would not trigger since your keyword was shoe but the OP and the Front page post both say shoes instead. And likely also because you said men for your keyword but the OP and front page post said men's not men, so the deal alert didn't see men's as matching your men keyword.

For variants, such as shoe and shoes, do shoe|shoes, to catch both variants. And do men|mens|"men's" to catch the men, mens or men's variants. (The word with the apostrophe ( ' ) must have quotes around it to work, same for dashes ( - ) such as T-Mobile [which you'd put as "T-Mobile" not just T-Mobile] or any other character in a word that isn't a letter or a number)

I guess your alert system is finicky because you said it doesn't pick up on stemming but I received an alert on May 22 for this deal and my keyword string is [Merrell Men]. The post doesn't have "men" anywhere in it. It has "men's". The end of the email specifically says "This deal matched your alert for "Merrell Men (2+ Thumbs)".

I think it'd be helpful if you made a new sticky post for deal alert rules. Nowhere in the other post does it mention the rule about apostrophes and it's also a decade old so who knows what else is out of date.

Thanks for the new keyword. I'll test it out. I wish I had it sooner. I already missed a deal a few days ago on some shoes I would have bought.

Oh yea I forgot to ask. How would you make a keyword that has an exclusion modifier, but if that post contains other keywords you're looking for then the exclusion is ignored?

For example, I don't want any deal alerts for posts that are ONLY for running shoes, but if that post has running shoes, and also has hiking or trail or skate shoes, then I still want to be alerted.

Is there a way to do this? Do I just make a separate keyword string for the other shoes?

That Wayback link didn't work.

How long does it take your system to send an alert after a keyword is triggered? I tried the keyword string you gave me and created an alert last night (I also added sneaker|sneakers to it) [men|mens|"men's" shoe|shoes|sneaker|sneakers -running] +3 rating. I did get one alert email this morning. Then I checked SD's men's shoes section and noticed it didn't send me alerts for this or this or this. I created the deal alert hours before those were posted. Don't they fall under the keyword string?

Unless I'm doing something wrong it feels like the alert system isn't completely reliable.

Also you said if I want to create a keyword for T-mobile I need to put quotes around it. So if I wanted a keyword string for Metro by T-mobile would I have to do it like ["metro by "t-mobile""] ?

You can try adding a forum notification and/or a mobile app notification and/or a PM and/or text notification to your alert, in addition to the email notification, then see if you get any of those notifications for the next thread(s) that get posted, in case it's an issue with your email client not receiving vs SD not sending. If you get those notices but not email, then that's a whole other issue.

Are your alerts set to email you as soon as it hits your thumb up threshold or as a daily digest instead? If it's set to instant, then you should get notification within minutes of it hitting your thumb up threshold. If daily digest, then it could be those threads didn't hit your thumb up threshold until after the digest was sent out already.

I checked my spam folder it's not there. Yes my alerts are set to instant email. I'll enable private and site notifications and see what happens. I use gmail so that shouldn't be an issue I hope.

Yeah try the other notification types. If those aren't working either, then something is wrong or the DA system may be calculating 'thumbs' as some other combination score vs just actual thumbs. (Will try to get clarification on that this coming week if I can, in the meantime)

Personally on my deal alerts, I don't use any minimum rating because I like to see everything that matches even if it ends up with thumbs down lol. So maybe something on how they count thumbs/rating for alerts has changed over the years that I'm not aware of.

So I received an email and private notification for this deal but not a site notification. I didn't receive any email or notifications at all for this deal which should have triggered. I'll try removing any minimum ratings and see if it improves.

Yeah you should have also received a site popup notification for the first one if you had that set. But the site popup notifications go poof quickly these days (within 10-30 seconds or so) so you may have to check your notification page itself to see it, if you didn't already check there.

And you should have also for the second one, unless the 3+ TU rating requires more than just thumbs up to get there. That's what I'll be trying to double check with a dev about in the next week or so if I can.

Hopefully removing any minimum rating will help for now at least, till we can figure out the rest hopefully soon.

After removing the minimum ratings and testing it out it looks like I'm getting all the email alerts. I think I'm getting most of the site notifications but I don't care about site or private notifications anyway. The email alert is what's important because I get notified instantly by my email app.

Did you ever confirm it was the thumbs up rating causing the issue? I'd imagine loads of users would be affected if that was the case but there haven't been a ton of threads about this. Are they just not noticing?

I'm glad you're getting all the email alerts now As for the thumbs rating, the dev that replied to you before has been on vacation, so I likely won't hear anything until they come back and have time to check into it. So it may be a bit of time yet.