Support Forum

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.