Subscribe to a forum?

Originally Posted by ITGeek007

“Not been on here for a while, but it would be useful (I've got this feeling you might have to upgrade the forum software to do it?) to be able to subscribe to a forum (or subforum), so whenever a new post is made (like this one maybe  ), then I can receive an email notification?

I subscribe to a number of forums and receive email notifications, and it's quite handy, because they act as a reminder that the forum is there (i.e. I don't forget about it).”

Thanks for the feedback 

If you subscribe reply to a thread, then you are deemed to have subscribed to it. Anyone who adds a comment after yours will then trigger a single notification email which goes out at 12.00 each day.

If you add a respond to a number of threads, and subsequent posts are made after yours, then these will be listed in the daily email. But you will only be notified once.

Then on a Friday, we will send a round up email that will highlight any threads that have you have contributed to in the past, have had replies, but you haven't visited.

Now if you visit a thread that you have previously commented on, then we capture this and don't email you. You can actually turn off notifications completely by going to your admin settings.

Previous feedback was that people were sick of getting bombarded by forum emails everytime they visited a post (even though you can normally tune these in your account settings). So we went for the option of a single email a day, and only for posts that have had interaction after yours.

But we don't have an option to voluntarily subscribe to a forum or thread, that you haven't commented on, and that's an interesting point.

We are actually in the planning stages of a full site rebuild and facelift, as the current look MLS dates back to 2012. The forum is much more recent and we plan to keep it pretty much the same, but looking to add in any ideas or better functionality, so will certainly consider that one.

We wrote the forum software inhouse after moving from vBulletin and not being a fan of any the current off the shelf solutions. So although more expensive than a plugin and pray platform, it does give us the ability to add, tweak, tune or do whatever anyone wants. 

I'll be doing a ideas and enhancements thread shortly, but that's certainly an idea worth exploring so thanks.

Hopefully you should receive an email after 12 today notifying you there has been a reply 

Hi Steve,

Thanks for that very comprehensive reply, however it was just this bit:

But we don't have an option to voluntarily subscribe to a forum or thread, that you haven't commented on, and that's an interesting point.

Wasn't interested in the threads bit, because once you've subcribed to a particular forum or subforum, then you should receive an email whenever a new "thread" is posted, which would be the whole point of signing up to a forum, would it not?

Anyway, thanks for that!

Not from research we did before we moved from vbulletin. The default nature of umpteen emails arriving through out the day was a standard moan, which is why we consciously decided to keep it to no more than a maximum of 1 a day, regardless how many threads/forums you subscribed to.

But I do like the idea of voluntarily subscribing to a forum, which should be relatively straight forward.

The default nature of umpteen emails arriving through out the day was a standard moan

LOL, I must kind of be the odd-one-out then, because it doesn't bother me too much (I already receive regular emails from other forums).  The only thing that bothers me these days is spam emails, but I just hit the Del button with those.  Of course, it does depend on how busy a forum is!

I don't mean to appear rude, but I've got a feeling you may of contradicted yourself there?

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but if I 'voluntarily' subscribe to a forum, then doesn't that mean that I WILL receive an email, whenever a new thread is posted?  But you've just put "which should be  relatively straightforward"?  But what I've bolded above (which you wrote), well, the two statements seem to conflict with each other surely?

Unless we are talking about different things here, and don't realise it?

Cor blimey, it's getting complicated. Feel a flow chart moment coming on

• You get a maximum of 1 email a day.
• That email may contain a single link to a thread that has been updated since the last time you visited it, or it may contain 10 links to 10 threads that have been updated since the last time you visited them.
• So 1 email telling you about 10 threads, versus 10 individual emails (or 15 or 50 if we became super uber popular, windswept and interesting).

So in that 1 email a day, you could also have notifications of threads you have voluntarily subscribed to (hence the good idea).

Does that make sense? 

But for those bods that just love the instantaneous of email notification after every single new post, then I suppose we could have a bombard me button? 

So don't think I've contradicted myself, and you don't sound rude. But as a fellow IT geek it all makes sense in my head. Whether it makes sense to any one else is a different story