Following the forums: Subscribing, Digests and Smartfeeds

[Matt Smith]

If you don't find it convenient to visit the actual forum each day there are three alternative methods of keeping up to date. This topic contains instructions to set them each up:

• Subscribing
• Digests
• Smartfeeds

Which to use will be down to your personal preference, each method has advantages and disadvantages. Subscribing to a forum provides you with rapid alerts when new posts are made but requires you to visit the forum to read the text contained in new posts (update: subscription emails have now been modified to include the text of the post). Digests deliver the text of all new posts to you via email, but they are only sent once per day. Smartfeeds (RSS feeds) contain the full post text and are updated about once per hour, but may require you to use another program on your PC/Phone to read them. Personally I use a combination of Digests and Smartfeeds to keep up to date with forum activity.

[Matt Smith]

Using Forum Subscriptions:

You can subscribe to any of the forums you have access to. Once subscribed you will receive an email alert when a new post is made to the forum. Subscription emails do not contain the text from the post, so you will still need to visit to forum to read the post after receiving the email (update: 15th May 2011, subscription emails have now been modified to contain the post text). The email alert contains a link to the forum post.

To set up a subscription:

1. Visit the forum you wish to subscribe to. At the bottom of the page you will see a link that reads "Subscribe to forum" (see image below). Click this link to subscribe.


2. To remove a subscription, first go to your User Control Panel. This is linked from all the forum pages (see image below):


3. Make sure the "Overview" tab is selected (number 1 on image below), then choose "Manage subscriptions" (number 2 on image below). Follow the instructions on the page to remove your subscription.

[Matt Smith]

Using Digests:

By enabling Digests you will receive a daily, weekly or monthly email listing all the new forum posts. Digest emails contain the full text of the forum posts, so you do not need to make a separate visit to the forum to read the text.

1. To enable Digests, first visit your User Control Panel by clicking the link visible on every forum page (see image below):


2. In your control panel select the Digests tab (number 1 in the image below). Choose the options that suit you best (number 2 in the image below. note: HTML styling should be fine for most email programs). Click submit when you are happy with the options you have chosen (number 3 in the image below)


3. To disable Digests follow the same procedure but choose "None" for the "Type of digest wanted".