New Feature: Email Notifications of Forum Posts

We’re delighted to announce a powerful new feature of the Academic Commons that should transform its use: members of the site will now receive email notifications when new posts are made to group discussion forums.

This seems like a relatively basic function, but it was something that was missing in the native version of our platform. With this new plugin, members of the site will find it much easier to stay on top of discussions in their groups, which we hope will result in more robust conversations on the site.

Because we know that our members lead busy lives and may not desire a deluge of Commons-related email, we have designed a notification system that provides a great deal of customization. Members can easily subscribe or unsubscribe to group forums by visiting their settings page .

To see the plugin in action, please visit any group, where you’ll see a message indicating whether or not you are currently subscribed to posts in that forum. You’ll also see a link to your settings page, where you can control your subscriptions to all of your groups. Here are a few screenshots:

A panel on each group home page lets users know whether they’ll automatically receive email notifications of new discussion activity in the group

A panel on each group home page lets users know whether they’ll automatically receive email notifications of new discussion activity in the group

Users can subscribe or unsubscribe from entire groups on the Notification Settings page

Users can subscribe or unsubscribe from entire groups on the Notification Settings page

For more on this new feature, please check out New BuddyPress / bbPress plugin: Group Forum Subscription, a post by our developer Boone Gorges. We’re very proud of Boone’s work on this plugin, and we hope that you find it to be a useful addition to the Commons.

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2 Responses to New Feature: Email Notifications of Forum Posts

  1. Maura A. Smale (she/her) October 3, 2009 at 9:06 pm #

    This is really great — I’m so bad about remembering to check my group forums and now I can continue to forget because it will be done automagically for me. Awesome work, as ever, Boone. Thanks!

  2. Matthew K. Gold (he/him) October 5, 2009 at 8:25 pm #

    Thanks, Maura! It feels strange to be excited about something as retro as email (now, if we had Google Wave notifications, we’d really have something!), but we’re pretty excited. Boone did a bang-up job on this one.

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