UBB.threads PHP Forum Software Community Forums General Suggestions and Feedback 3 Important suggestions for the Watched feature

The original users of my bulletin board at forums.atril.com come from a mailing list. They are therefore VERY sceptical about bulletin boards in general, as they are completely used to receiving messages in their mail box, instead of going to the messages themselves.

This has lead to them being quite demanding when it comes to the Watched feature (i.e. the feature that automatically e-mails them whenever something has been posted). They came up with 3 very good suggestions:

1. In the Control Panel it should be possible to edit the subject headers of e-mails. I.e. you should be able to set the following:

a) The prefix of the subject (for example the website name)
b) E-mail subject nicks for each forum (i.e. if a forum is called A Bug's Life, that's pretty long for a forum name and therefore hard to sort in e-mail software - therefore a nick like Bugs should be used).
c) Separators (currently SPACE+:+SPACE - but the spaces are superfluous so let's make the whole thing editable while we're at it).

2. There should be a Watched Threads feature that only e-mails when a new thread is opened on a certain forum (i.e. no e-mail for every posting).

3. And to make the life of the admin easier, as all my users are using the Watched feature:

The forum should automatically turn all mail features for a user off if the mail bounces back. Currently I have to do this manually, which is a real PITA as more than 100 users are using the Watched feature now.

Make that 4:

4. Some users would like to be able to archive the entire discussion in their e-mail software. They need an option that indicates whether they would like to receive e-mails about their own postings too.

#3 is impractical; not all bouncebacks contain the same data, and some auto responders look like bouncebacks... Not to mention, you'd have to make both a POP3 reader AND a tunnel script for compatability...

It'd take way too long to do, and be quite anal on how it'd have to handle things that I doubt it'd be used by enough users for it to be needed as an official feature.

Personally i think the whole watched thing is too tucked away.
And could do with a re-vamp.

By this i mean, your scrolling down a huge page if you have
alot of forums and for get what the headers are for and the
actual options you are selecting.

That's me anyways.