UBB.threads PHP Forum Software Community Forums General Suggestions and Feedback Notify as a Pm

No PM, no e-mail. Just show "unhandled notifies" in some way above the forum.

At our board I made a hack to do this. Notifies are put in a table, with a "handled or not" flag, and if you are a moderator/admin you get to see in the header the number of unhandled number of notifies.

All 14 of us are global admins/mods, so this saves a lot of e-mail load. We really had a problem when coming home after a day that your e-mail box would be full of notifies and every mod/admin had to wade through all of them to see if they were handled or not.

With this system, our response times to notifies have become significantly faster, none are forgotten anymore in the bulk, and mods/admins are not bothered anymore with notifies that are handled already.
As an added bonus, we also have statistics of who use the notify option the most and maybe use that information to see if somebody would fit in your moderatorteam.

b.t.w., on the example image, it's called a "Fluitje", that's whistle in english, and that's how we call them at our board.

My header also notifies in case of new user registrations, new unapproved posts, new displayname change requests. And new user registrations/display name changes are only shown to the admins that keep themselve busy with that.