it’s nice to see some work starting on improvements
Might be worth checking out this plugin for ideas and/or code!
https://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/subscribe-to-topic/
Very nice. 
Now, will it support Permalinks?
Nice to see some changes happening.
Peace, Michael
I think a subscriptions.php can also be added to the templates like the favourites.php, where the user can edit the topics he/she has subscribed. And then the links to subscribe to topic can be prettier like the add this topic to your favourites one.
Checkbox under posting form, checked by default
I assume this checkbox auto-subscribes to this topic.
But that raises a side issues: User Settings. Remember the default per-user, as an account settings.
Currently I hack settings into the profile data (since they are easy to call out almost anywhere without special functions). Of course I also had to hack the profile data structure slightly to categorize each piece of profile data – both to split settings from public information, and do other things – like group similar data together, or define the input field type. Note that there is an array already in place to categorise profile information, although it refers to data by position (0,1,etc), not key name, which can makes hacking it messy.
Cookies would be the lazy option, but a tad confusing for users that don’t visit regularly, or visit from different computers.
(After 10 minutes I didn’t get anything – but it could be an email snarl-up.)
Shouldn’t it use bb_meta (or bb_usermeta) and not bb_taxonomy?
I’m clearly not awake yet (the email did arrive with Ben L.’s update), but:
It looks like it sends out an email regardless of how many minutes have elapsed since the last email.
This is going to get a few forums marked as spammers, because the sheer volume of almost-identical emails sent out could be huge. And imagine subscribing to a big forum topic, only to wake up the next morning to discover 20 emails telling you the topic had been updated. It doesn’t seem to scale well for very long and/or frequently updated topics.
Perhaps wait until the user does something on the forums before sending anything other then the first email? But BBPress doesn’t seem to record any actions against the user.
Added: A very crude test could only send out an email if the user’s last_posted time fell in between the time of this post and the previous post. It’s a very approx measure of activity, neither relating directly to the subscribed topic, nor reflecting a visit to only read. And would need some explanation (“you won’t be updated again until you post on the forums”). I already don’t like that as a solution, but it would put a cap the spamming, while still being somewhat useful as a means of getting the author back to the forum.
Second random thought: Since this function is already looking like something that might need to be turned off, perhaps it should be sitting in bb-plugins?
i am testing now, please dont hate me 
)
timskii, there are no plans to add any new user options for this feature, there’s no need.
As for the time issue, it’s possible that it could generate a lot of email but that doesn’t mean you’re going to be marked as spam. It’s nice to have one-per-message especially for threading and following conversations in things like Gmail. If anyone gets too much email, they can one-click unsubscribe from the thread and follow it in a different manner, like RSS. This is how new comment notifications have worked for years on the blog side, and it’s been fine.
Matt – That said, please consider some method for the forum administrator to turn Subscriptions off – just in case it gets out of hand. Canonical (bb-plugins) plugin, admin setting, whatever.
I think I have found a bug. From all three topics I’m subscribed to, this night I got four e-mails with spam posts from snj19 and yajia. I doubt that those post ever appeared on topic and they’re probably caught by Akismet, but they still were sent to e-mail subscribers.
What is interesting is that there wasn’t title of topic in title of e-mail, as it was in other messages I got from here.
I can confirm similar messages as well, also from yajia and snj19.
I just opened ticket #1233 at trac, before I read these actually.
timskii, there are no plans to add any new user options for this feature, there’s no need.
As for the time issue, it’s possible that it could generate a lot of email but that doesn’t mean you’re going to be marked as spam. It’s nice to have one-per-message especially for threading and following conversations in things like Gmail. If anyone gets too much email, they can one-click unsubscribe from the thread and follow it in a different manner, like RSS. This is how new comment notifications have worked for years on the blog side, and it’s been fine.
I don’t agree Matt, for example Gmail marks mail messages as spam if you get too much with the same content (even messages from Google Groups).
vBulletin has a feature that only one message is send for replies by a unique member.
I stopped developing that kind of plugin because these timestamps / filters are too much work with the current version. I will not use the subscription function if there is an email message for each reply and I’m sure I’m not the only one…
I use that subscription plugin I linked above… it’s been great, and we haven’t had problems with delivery. It might get out of hand if we default subscribed members to threads… but it’s opt-in, so the number of subscription emails is much lower than you’d think.
Hi John,
My servers IP get on black lists after my mailing list got more than 1500 members and I send only one mail / day. (this took only 10 weeks)
Just imagine if you have x.xxx subscribers and x.xxx topics, there are maybe thousands of mail messages a day. Every “filter” will help…
Hey Olaf – I don’t doubt that email delivery can be tricky… we got around a lot of that by using SPF and other tricks to ensure delivery:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sender_Policy_Framework
In any case, you’re always free to not use this particular plugin!
Although I’m still not clear on why this plugin/feature is being programmed… there’s a very similar email subscriptions plugin that already works great. But I’m guessing this is going to get put into the core, so maybe it’s being programmed differently as a result.
@John,
I’m not talking about the plugin but about a core feature, I think email subscription is one of the secrets why forums and blogs succeed. My remark is just about why some “mail filter” is very important.
PS. If I send mail messages from websites I use always a SPF record 
Ah yah, vBulletin does a great job batching email updates. But batching updates is a lot harder than just emailing out immediate updates… that’s probably why they’re starting off with this approach.
I’d be a lot more comfortable with that if this was a plugin and not in the core… curious what the plan is on that front!
I checked bbpress for “batching email updates” and noticed that an extra table is needed.
One of the reasons I stopped looking into that feature.
EDIT: Important functions should belong to the core system, otherwise the development of some plugin might stop (like in this case)
Yah it gets tricky with posts being editable and topics being deletable… tricky stuff!
