My forum traffic on my three forums I run has been steadily dying over the past year or so. When I watch the growth of my Faceboo pages, a key feature on FB seems to be that any time someone posts, I get popped an email. It lures me back.

In UBB I'd have to manually watch the forum / thread, then *also* tell the system to email me those notes. The vast majority of my users never do that. So they forget to check, and fade away.

I would like to alter the code so by default everyone is set to get email alerts on watched threads, and they can turn it off if they want. Also, I want it to have it auto-watch anything they create or reply to, which they can turn off.

Is that fairly easy? Looking at this posting form it appears at least for new posts that it should be easy to implement. Just check that box below. What is the code change to auto turn on the email option? Any thoughts?

Hmmm ok it's not quite easy. There's code in there that calls

{if $addtofav}
{$addtofav}<br />

but I can't find where that is. Any hints?

I've been pretty sick lately otherwise I'd try to be a little more helpful; but "addtofav" is defined in only the new post and new reply pages; i haven't even really looked at the code to look at it to see the difficulty but I did take and use grep to see where all it's listed for you...

Keep in mind that scripts do processing, templates do the display.

[root@ns1 forum]# grep -r "addtofav" *
scripts/newpost.inc.php: $addtofav = "";
scripts/newpost.inc.php: $addtofav = "
scripts/newpost.inc.php: "addtofav" => $addtofav,
scripts/newreply.inc.php: $addtofav = "";
scripts/newreply.inc.php: $addtofav = "
scripts/newreply.inc.php: "addtofav" => $addtofav,
templates/default/newpost.tpl:{if $addtofav}
templates/default/newpost.tpl:{$addtofav}<br />
templates/default/newreply.tpl:{if $addtofav}
templates/default/newreply.tpl:{$addtofav}<br />

Thanks Gizmo. My server is not working well - my search on it found nothing. I had to download my entire forums to my local hard drive to be able to look through it. I don't know why search doesn't work reliably. So I did find the two scripts and changed it there. I did that for the lisashea.com forum and that works for full adds and replies.

Any thoughts on how I could add it to a quick reply? I'd want to do it there as well.

Once that is done, how do I globally set all users to have these email them? I.e. what's the database setting that sets these watched forums to email by default? I'll go dig through the database myself to see if I can find it. I'll want to run a script to turn it on for everyone, and then change the code so all new users get it set by default. They can of course unset it if they want. But I think this is key to draw users back to posts they make.

OK in the ubbt_watch_lists it looks like they can have entries for watch_type t (thread) or u (user). And the notify_immediate is 0 or 1. So if set those all to 1 will it email them each time?

And then on the ubbt_user_profile do I set all the user_email_watchlists to 1 instead of 0?

Will that do it, do you think?

I believe so, yes.

Dear Gizmo -

OK there still seems to be a hole here. If someone does a quick-reply, it doesn't watch. They have to do a full reply. Any thoughts on how to add an auto-watch code to the quick reply?

If you look at the form for the quick reply and the one from the full reply page you'll see that some variables on the full reply page aren't displayed on the quick reply page; you could try adding the inputs manually though and see if it'll work.

OK I'll play with that and see what I can do. Thanks!

Also, just to check, if members are banned they don't get any messages, true? I want to make sure that banned members won't be inundated with messages and then get annoyed with me.