Subscribing a Forum Will Not E-mail You

[John Scheffel]

In the E-mail exchange about the mailing lists I indicated that you could subscribe a forum and get an E-mail everytime someone posted. I have since found that this is not true. I had never tried this feature since I get too much E-mail as it is. But I had tried subscribing threads and that does E-mail you when someone posts. I always assumed subscribing a forum did the same, but when Bob tested it he got no E-mail. Some investigation turned up the following thread on the vBulletin web site.

http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=56425

So this feature will work in vBulletin version 3 (coming soon), but not the version we are running.

It is possible to setup an E-mail list for each forum, then through the admin panel we could set it to send to that list whenever someone posts. I have not tried this but it should work. We could even use the existing E-mails for the forums on SolidDesigner, ME10, and Work Manager as long as the people on the lists agree.

If anyone thinks that would be of value please post your thoughts here.

[Bob Zajeski]

I think we should wait until version 3. We set up the mailing lists like they were on the old site and should be sufficient until then. I really like the Forum - it's easy to maintain and centralizes the data.

[gmatelich]

I was also dissappointed to find subscribing doesn't send you an email. It seems like that would be a good interim solution, except that I assume it would mean having to change the way the way things work, for now, then change the way they work again later. People hate change. If it's possible to keep things nearly seamless, and the work on you isn't too extreme, I don't see a downside.

[bfisher]

From the traffic on the subject last week, which was unanimous on supporting the current e-mail lists, I vote to continue the existing e-mail lists, at least until we can implement and try the e-mail feature from Rev 3. BTW, I'm impressed with the forum layout, and my congrats and thanks to those who obviously put a lot of time and effort into it.

[John Scheffel]

Given all the replies supporting the continuation of the E-mail lists, I doubt Bob or I would consider removing them any time soon. They do provide a useful way to broadcast information to people. There is a way to broadcast E-mail to everyone who registered for the forum, but it is available only to administrators.

I think the current E-mail lists will remain until popular opinion is that they are no longer needed. Maybe at some future date we will post a poll to this forum to see if people want to continue the lists.