Confused about "Subscribe to this Forum"

[cdemarco]

I'm a recent new member of this forum, and discovered that one is unable to receive copies of all postings in a given forum (like you would in a discussion list, or Yahoo! forums, etc.), but rather only e-mail notification of responses within specific threads in a forum.

Could someone please explain to me then the function of the link option to "Subscribe to this Forum" which appears at the top right of the forum indices? Since the forum software doesn't e-mail you (either individually or in digest forum) all new posts within a given forum, what exactly does it accomplish then to "subscribe" to a forum? Thanks in advance.

[norther practitioner]

No idea.. just check it out every once in a while..

[GeneChing]

It's the first time anyone has asked about this, really.

[cdemarco]

Originally posted by GeneChing
Did you try the suscribe to the thread function?

As far as I can see, subscribing to a given thread results only in receiving an e-mail notification of responses within that thread; it doesn't contain the actual text of the response(s), which thereby necessitates a visit to the actual forum. Also, that feature wouldn't notify you of new threads started. Plus, you would have to subscribe to each and every individual extant thread that you were interested in. It would seem that a "Subscribe to this Forum" feature should cover those bases. Maybe I should check with the vBulletin creators - I'm sure there must be some functionality to this "Subscribe to this Forum" feature. But thanks anyway.

[cdemarco]

OK, it looks like the functionality to receive daily or weekly digests of new posts within subscribed forums exists in vBulletin version 3:

http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=75706

http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=70316

. . . but not in prior versions of the software, such as that used here by Kung Fu Magazine (v. 2.2.7). It looks like previously, the software developers couldn't agree on how to implement the "Subscribe to this Forum" feature, so the link simply had no functionality yet (http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=57948).

So my question now, Gene, is: any chance of getting you guys to upgrade your vBulletin software so that we can all enjoy this wonderful and useful feature? Thanks for your consideration.

[GeneChing]

It's been something that we've been thinking about, but the last time we'd did an upgrade, it took us offline for a spell and was really buggy. Right now, we're focused on doing some reformating in other departments (other sites and the magazine) so installing the update is a back burner project.