Forum needs email alerts

Please can this forum be modified to send emails for replies and alerts for new topics that are tagged with a ‘watched’ tag.

that’s not going to happen
if you want to keep up – subscribe to the rss feed

I’ve asked samboll for years to bring that functionality to these forums but he resists ??

Re: samboll

Thank you for your carefully considered and well thought out reply. I am aware of RSS feeds but two points,

1. I can’t subscribe to threads that don’t exist
2. I have to actively check RSS.

For example, https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/380076, the original post is 5 days old. OK – maybe my error for not checking RSS, but now I can’t even e-mail the topic author with a solution. It makes me look bad, WordPress look bad and this forum unresponsive.

WP is a great product, but could be better with an email feature in this forum. Just take the time to check out the number of ‘dead’ threads.

I just don’t see the big deal with not adding the feature. Maybe you could explain it to me. The fact that the vast majority of forums have this feature should tell you something.

Actually I was just kidding. This forum is based on https://bbpress.org and moderators have no ability to change any feature provided by the software running these forums.

As the forum software is controlled by automattic.com personnel, only they have the power to make such changes, and to-date that feature has not been implemented.

You might join the wp-forums email list and make your ideas known there. That mailing list is for forum management issues and I believe some of the automattic.com people do read that from time to time.

https://bbpress.org/forums/tags/notification

Opps – pressed return too quick.

Thanks for taking the time to respond and explain the situation.

You might find it useful to look at the following: see above.

I’ve asked samboll for years to bring that functionality to these forums but he resists ??

and no IM’s either!

I suspect that notifications for the many users on here may imposes quite a burden, and could be used as part of a DOS attack. But that’s just wild speculation as to why it may not have been introduced.

The great news is that bbPress 1.1 will contain email notifications, finally! This is confirmed in the January 13th 2010 bbPress IRC meetup that occurred. Matt took it upon himself to add it in.

https://bbpress.org/blog/2010/01/2010-01-13-meetup/

Since bbPress powers the www.ads-software.com forum, I’d say email notification support will come once 1.1 is released and the forum is upgraded to it.

It was interesting because when I interviewed Matt on a podcast I do, I had the chance to talk about it and he was wrong about RSS becoming the defact standard of being notified about new updates. RSS is not as ubiquitous as email and it never caught on as he thought it would. On the other hand, email is everywhere, including mobile phones. It’s just common sense to have email notifications.

Lack of email notifications is the primary reason why I don’t even bother responding to or creating new threads on a regular basis on this forum.

I understand the desire for emailing a notification if someone posts a comment to a thread of interest. But for regular forum contributors, wouldn’t email be burdensome?

Not if you provide the UI so that users can choose to automatically subscribe to any thread they post to or create, or have them manually subscribe. There is also the option to receive instant email notification or receive a daily or perhaps weekly digest of activity into your inbox.

As for regular forum contributors, just turn email off and do things the old fashioned way with RSS or your preferred method. I check email 20 times a day, I barely check my feedreader once a day.

Email notifications should not be mandatory though.

As for regular forum contributors, just turn email off and do things the old fashioned way with RSS or your preferred method.

I’d guess regular forum contributors don’t use RSS or won’t use email. Way too many threads for that. Most probably look at the No Replies view to see what needs addressing.

Email good for user wanting to track their individual threads, but probably not as helpful for the volunteers contributing large numbers of answers.

But if email capability will encourge users to help out in the forums then bring it on!

Hello anyone
It seems for me that it is almost impossible to get in touch with any kind of support in wp. I am not so experienced at internet but have built a site with wp. My problem is that I dont know where I can read emails which are sent to the adress that was generated with building the site.
Can anyone here give me a clue?

@karlskotte: Please post a new topic.

If you’re talking about a WordPress.com site, the support for that is here or you can contact the team here.