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Sorry, this isn't possible, however there are RSS feeds available for the whole Forum, seperate Groups and individual Topics as well as users being able to manually subscribe to topics if they require instant email notification.

Sending out hundreds or even thousands of emails every day is not a good idea. RSS is a much better solution and I would advise you to use this feature rather than email notifications.

Thansk Luffer. Given the fact that it currently IS a mailling list, there obviously is no technical argument why it should not continue. It's understandable that they want to continue to offer that alert to their users. 

The users are not at all computer savvy - and won't know how to set up their browser to monitor RSS. But they DO know how to use their email and read messages in their inbox.

I can train a few people how to change their ways - but not 1,500 list members.

Hi Mr. Papa:

Just so that I can advise my client correctly…

Can one set a default "subscribe" option so that new users will always be subscribed to all the topics they post/reply to UNLESS they uncheck that option?

Also, there must already be some SQL query in place that joins some user table with some subscription table to derive a list of all email addresses where the "subscribed" condition is true. It should be possible to customize that SQL query by appending "OR true" to the WHERE clause so that EVERY user's email address is considered subscribed.

This way, we could run the forum in "all are subscribed to everything" mode for 3 months – by which time everyone is up to speed and we can announce a "new" method where people will be responsible for checking the forum online.

Possible?

Of course, at the end it would still be nice to have some weekly or monthly "what's new on the forum" email…

Best Regards,

Andy

Thanks for your reply. We would probably wait for 4.2 then.

I will try to find that hack. The fact that people already have had to hack it and it has come up in the past, tells you that there are website operators who do have reasonably small user groups who are not computer/internet/forum savy and where those website operators are comfortable commiting sufficient server resources to allow inidivual emails being generated to all for their low-frequency message boards.

My client doesn't have a "chatty" group at all – but the occasional messages are highly relevant to everyone when they are posted. They'd like to switch to a forum to attract additional members and to start building a "knowledge base" so that new members can learn from previous discussions about a certain technique. The intent is to add MORE capabilities without taking existing/trusted capabilities away!

No matter how you feel about using that feature for your own board, doesn't mean that there isn't a uitlity for other board operators under their specific circumstances. I see no reason why you would "override" that legitmate need just because you are generally against it for your specific circumstance?

Just my 10cents worth <G>

Luffer, yes these are all valid considerations that a web master needs to keep in mind.

But it's not the job of an application developer to police their customers. In our case, we have a mail server that deals with about 150,000 messages a day – some of our mailing lists already go into the ten-thousands.

Let's look at it this way:

We currently have a list server the sends each message to every subscriber. Clearly we have the capability to do that and are willing to continue to do that. There really is no reason for any third-party to broadly decide that this "must" never be done.

Our subscribers explicitly subscribed to that list to be included in that format of the information exchagen – who's to argue with that?