Notifications - Getting/Dealing with E-mails from the forum

[David LeBow]

I don't come and look at the forum every day to see what changed, but I am interested to hear when something new is posted. I handle that through the forum's "Notifications" facility.

You can configure how (and when and whether) you'd like to be notified about activity on the TAG member forum. You find that by navigating to the "User Control Panel". You can get there using the drop-down next to your name in the upper-right hand corner:

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On the user control panel, select "Board preferences" and then "Edit notification options". There, you can determine how you want to hear about changes and which ones you're interested in. You can show them as "Notifications" (only visible while viewing the forum) and/or receive an e-mail notification.

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New notifications can be viewed by clicking on the "Notifications" control in the upper-right of the forum page:

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If you have as yet unread notifications, an indicator will appear next to the notifications link:

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But... all of that requires you to go and look at the forum page.

If you set it up to receive e-mail notifications, a message will be sent to your inbox for each "thing you subscribe to". You automatically subscribe to a post if you reply to it. If you wish to explicitly subscribe to a post, scroll to the bottom of the post's page and click the "Subscribe" link. If you wish to hear about everything new in a particular forum or sub-forum, click the forum you're interested in and click the forum's "Subscribe" link.

Of course, everyone gets too much e-mail and the idea of getting more from the forum might feel a little daunting. I've solved that by creating an e-mail rule which recognizes notifications from the forum and automatically moves them into a special mail folder so that I can process them when I get a chance. In my case, I created a "TAG Forum" folder to receive all of my forum e-mail:

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I then created a rule which uses a recurring text in the body of the forum messages (the forum name) to automatically funnel the messages into the target folder:

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One final important note: Until you click the link and visit the post or forum in question, new, additional notifications for that post or forum will not be sent out. That is, if you wait too long, you might end up overlooking forum activity.

Hope that helps!