forum – components – subscriptions… you can set up auto subscribe…

if users want to receive notifications, yes, they need to be subscribed to the forums and/or topics…

Hi, I have enabled “Auto subscribe members to all topics they post in” and it doesn’t seem to be working. Do I need to set up something anywhere else or just simply enable it?

Once I enabled it, I logged in as a user (non-admin) and replied to a topic and it is not listed in the “subscribed” area at the top.

I also enabled “Allow members to subscribe to forums in addition to topics” but don’t see the option to subscribe to a forum. 

subscribed area at top???  do you mean when you click the button?  keep in mind that only displays subscribed topics with unread posts…  go to your profile if you want to see your list of subscribed forums and topics…

and changing the auto subscribe option only affects new users as the text with the option says… existing users wont be affected…  as admin, though you can go to their profile and subscribe them… of course, kind of a pain if you have lots of users…

Thank you for the clarification. I didn’t see “existing users won’t be affected” in the codex or in the options.

Your help is mucho appreciated! Thanks! 

You’re welcome.

There is no way to automatically subscribe a user to a forum through the admin panel, but if you’re comfortable working directly in the database, you can force user subscriptions by taking the following steps:

WARNING:  The data in the database is stored in serialized format.  The smallest typo in the data has the potential to screw things up, so be careful.  I recommend using the following tools to help serialize your data and/or to verify that your serialization worked properly:

• To unserialize data: http://i-tools.org/unserialize/exec
• To serialize data: http://serialize.onlinephpfunctions.com/

To manually subscribe new users to a forum, take the following steps:

• Go to the sf_forums table and make note of the forum_id for the forum(s) to which you want to subscribe your user
• Find the user in the sf_members table and make note of the user’s user_id
• Create a php code snippet for an array containing the [forum_id]s for which you want to subscribe your user.  For example, if you wanted your user to be subscribed to forums with forum_id 2 and 19, create code similar to the following:
  array (0 => 2,1 => 19,);
• Copy the code snippet you just created into the text box at http://serialize.onlinephpfunctions.com/ and click the Execute button
• The site will generate a serialized version of the array.  For the above example, the result would look like this:
  a:2:{i:0;i:2;i:1;i:19;}
• Edit the row for your desired user in the sf_members table, changing the following columns:
  • forum_subscribe:  set to the serialized data you just generated in the previous step
  • subscribe_digest: set to 1
• Now that you’ve linked the user to the forum, you also need to link the forum to the user
• Go to the sf_forums table
• For each forum to which you want your user to subscribe, you’ll need to modify the forum_subs column to add in the additional users.  There’s a good chance you already have some users subscribed to the forum, so you need to make sure you correctly serialize the new data.  I recommend the following safer method for making sure the data is clean:
  • Copy the existing value in the forum_subs column and paste it into the text box at http://i-tools.org/unserialize/exec
  • Click the Unserialize button at the above website
  • Copy the unserialized code into the text box at http://serialize.onlinephpfunctions.com/
  • Before you click the Execute button, add your additional user(s) to the end of the array
  • Click the Execute button
  • Copy the generated, serialized value into the forum_subs column in the sf_forums table for the desired forum

*Note:  newly-subscribed users will only receive notices about topics that were created after you subscribed them.  Any topics created earlier in the day will not go to the users’ digest.   But if you really want to go back and make sure they get the notice of any topics already created, you can modify the subscriptions column in the sf_digest table, adding the user_id value to the existing array.   Follow the same procedure as above to unserialize and re-serialize the data.

Sandra De Freitas said
Hi, I have enabled “Auto subscribe members to all topics they post in” and it doesn’t seem to be working. Do I need to set up something anywhere else or just simply enable it? Once I enabled it, I logged in as a user (non-admin) and replied to a topic and it is not listed in the “subscribed” area at the top.   I also enabled “Allow members to subscribe to forums in addition to topics” but don’t see the option to subscribe to a forum. 

Check the user permissions for each permission set (Forum | Permissions from the WP dashboard).  In the General area, verify that the checkbox for “Can subscribe to forums (if enabled) and topics” is selected.

not sure I follow… first, as the admin panel, says, that auto subscribe only works for new members… it does not retroactively change for existing users…

did you add the template tag where you want the button to be??? see: http://codex.simple-press.com/codex/plugins/our-plugins/available-plugins/subscriptions/

and you dont have an icon for it on the group view page??