Plans to introduce email limiting or smart notifications?

I can see how a smarter notification management would be useful. I currently have no plans for adding this feature, but I would gladly assist you hooking your own code into my plugin.

As is, you could hook bbp_subscription_email_headers to set a custom header to mark bbPress notification emails, then hook phpmailer_init and replace the standard phpmailer instance with a custom phpmailer child class instance that strips the header if present and determines whether to send this email based on recipient address and subject line.

While this would work, it isn’t exactly pretty. I could add a bbp_notify_topic_subscribers( $user_ids, $forum_id, $topic_id, $reply_id ) filter hook, so you can track and remove users from the list of recipients as desired. With the information provided by the filter you could also easily implement more complex logic, e.g. not sending notifications for short replies or replies posted by spammy users.

Im looking the same thing, cause I have a popular thread and I receive a lot of separate emails. It’s very probably that users remove suscription because of this.

Any way to send periodically notifications? Like 1 mail each hour with all posts in that single mail?

My answer is still the same, I can offer a filter for you to program your own logic.

But think about this: Wouldn’t one email per hour be just as annoying? I would certainly unsubscribe before getting an email per hour for a thread I know to be very active. But is that really a problem? Because if I know the thread to be active, then what would be the point of subscribing? I only subscribe to slow moving threads that I don’t want to monitor manually. For the active threads, I can just visit the forums.

Most forums offer ‘smart notifications’ when members subscribe to a topic. They will receive an email as soon as a new post is made, but they will not receive any more notifications about future posts on that specific topic until after they revisit the forum topic. This is a far more effective way of handling subscriptions and I wish it was included in bbpress core.

That’s right. A mail for every post is really scaring.