Greetings and Salutations -

I just finished a set of changes to our BellaOnline forums. They involve "watch lists" and how the forums send alerts to our members. Here is the gist of the change.

Before, when a visitor made a post to our forum, they would never know if anybody responded to them. They had to click a number of different buttons in order to get email alerts of replies. Most people never did that. Meaning if they posted, they only knew if they got a reply if they went back and looked all the time. Few people did, so people would get discouraged. Even when we replied, they didn't know it.

I have now changed the system so that all members by default are set to get email messages on forums or threads they are "watching". When a person makes a new post, they automatically get set to watch that thread they posted to. That way they will get email alerts when someone replies to them. This is the way Facebook and most other systems work. It's a convenience thing. It means users actually know when people respond to them.

You can still always turn this off if you want. The setting for whether or not you get an email alert to each watched thread is under My Stuff - Edit Preferences. About half way down is an entry which says:

"By default should anything added to your Watch Lists be emailed to you?"

You can set that to "no" to turn off emails.

I do highly recommend you watch your forum area and have it sending you emails whenever anybody posts in there. That way you know there's a question waiting for you, and can go in to answer it!

You can tell what threads and forums you are watching by going into My Stuff - Watch Lists. You'll see in there that you can watch entire forum areas, specific threads, and specific users.

This change should help improve the user-friendliness of our forums and help our visitors know when they get responses to their questions.

Please let me know if you have any questions at all about this update! I'll be emailing the entire forum community shortly so they know about this change.

Sincerely,

Lisa Shea, owner
BellaOnline.com

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