Regarding the current Forum subscriptions:
1. Do they apply only to the current forum, or to sub-forums as well? I am seeing behavior that a subscription to a forum does ”’not”’ subscribe you to all sub-forums as well. Will I and all my moderators have to go and subscribe to each sub-forum in the entire forum tree?
2. Do they apply only to new topics? Or to ask another way, do they also apply to all of a forum’s existing topic replies? Here again, I am seeing behavior that leads me to believe that I will only get a single new topic notification, but I will have to go and ”’manually subscribe”’ to each individual topic if I want to see replies to that topic. For administrators and moderators this would be nastily inconvenient behavior.
The wording at https://codex.bbpress.org/forum-settings/ for precisely what subscriptions do appears ambiguous to me in these areas.
Even though RSS for the entire forum is currently implemented, I still have a great interest in a simple email subscription that is equivalent. Simply put, the reason is simplicity for my users, moderators, etc., as well as for me as an administrator/implementer. While I can setup something using the RSS feed that would generate email notifications to all my moderators, I don’t want to for a variety of reasons including time to implement and potential security holes.
A thought: you may decide to implement both “forum local” and “forum with sub-forums” subscriptions. When unsubscribed, the links would display as:
”’Subscribe”’ – if there are no sub-forums
”’Subscribe with sub-forums”’ – if there are sub-forums (the default)
”’Subscribe without sub-forums”’ – if there are sub-forums (user selectable)
where the ”’without sub-forums”’ versus ”’with sub-forums”’ are 2 faces of a toggle link (similar to your Subscribe/Unsubscribe toggle link) controlling what the ”’Subscribe”’ link in fact subscribes the user to.
If you choose to implement only a single behavior for forum subscriptions, I am ”’strongly”’ in favor of including all sub-forum new topics and replies. I can see every bbPress site administrator and forum moderator wanting this functionality.
I also think it extremely counter intuitive to not include existing topic replies in a forum subscription. I hope you do already, but I have not experimented with it enough to know precisely how the forum subscriptions behave.
NB: The “unsubscribe” bug may have clouded my observations of real forum subscription behavior.
Can anybody tell me how to subscribe to an entire forum. I have the option turned on in the dashboard but can’t say anything related in the front end.
How does a user subscribe to a forum?
