Forums

This thread spans a good few years and turns into a bit of an argument.

Having weighed up vBulletin and CS2007, I chose CS2007 for it's ability to integrate blogs, files, forums and plain old pages into one solution with a simple single sign-on and am fairly happy so far. vBulletin is a very in-depth forum solution though. Looking forward to 2008 as I think I can really utilise the groups feature for our customer base (used in a B2B environment - we sell software solutions).

Anyway... is there a module that works for CS2007 so that all users are atumotaically subscribed to forums? If so, can we select which forums users are subscribed to by default? and finally... what can I do about the 600+ existing members - can I subscribe them using an SQL Query?

Cheers!

I know this is an old thread but rather than start a new one, it seemed more appropriate to add to the voices here.

We have a site that needs automatic enrollment of users in forum e-mail messages.  We are currently running CS2007 and would almost certainly upgrade if we could handle our forum e-mail differently.

Here is our situation.  Possible someone will have either a solution for us or just let us know it isn't going to happen and we can start looking at other products.

We have a number of top level Forum groups.  Inside these forums groups are anything from a few to many sub-forums, possibly with forums inside them.

We use the forum / sub-forum structure to organize specific information and the sub-forums are created regularly and also retired.

Our structure would look something like this:

1. Forum1
   1. Forum1(a)
   2. Forum1(b)
      1. Forum1(b)(i)
      2. Forum1(b)(i)
   3. Forum1(c)
      1. Forum1(c)(i)
2. Forum2
   1. Forum1(a)
      1. Forum1(a)(i)

And so on... you get the idea.  Of course our real forums have interesting and descriptive names but this is just for illustration of the issue.

When we set up Forum1 we may not have any sub-forums defined yet and the users will just subscribe to Forum1 e-mails.  All is well in our forum world...

Then a situation causes us to need Forum1(a) to sub-categorize the information and posts... now we have a small issue.  Unless users know to go look for a new forum they don't get subscribed to it and don't receive postings from that forum.

Hmm.  We can broadcast an e-mail or post in the parent forum that they should go look for and subscribe to this forum but that requires additional management and users get a "system" type notice that they may not pay attention to.  Inevitably, at least some of the user base will not subscribe and the problem persists.

As we add more and more sub-forums (and sub-sub-forums) in the course of our business needs, the problem grows.  Soon people are not subscribed to large blocks of sub-forums.

What we need is for the subscription in the branch to be inherited going down.  So if a user chose to subscribe to Forum1, they would be subscribed to each sub-forum that is set up inside the Forum1 branch.

I have not been able to find that this is a feature in the current version of CS but possibly you could enlighten me.  (hoping)

If it is not a feature, it does seem like a useful enhancement.  It doesn't seem unreasonable that a user who subscribes to a parent forum would want to be subscribed to the child forums.  Possibly it could be an option for the user in subscribing to say "... and all child forums".

Thanks for taking the time to read this.

Rob Huston

I realized too late that my Forum diagram was wrong.  Please see below as I corrected the Forum2 numbers...  Too quick to the post button

Rob

Rob Huston

I know this is an old thread but rather than start a new one, it seemed more appropriate to add to the voices here.

We have a site that needs automatic enrollment of users in forum e-mail messages.  We are currently running CS2007 and would almost certainly upgrade if we could handle our forum e-mail differently.

Here is our situation.  Possible someone will have either a solution for us or just let us know it isn't going to happen and we can start looking at other products.

We have a number of top level Forum groups.  Inside these forums groups are anything from a few to many sub-forums, possibly with forums inside them.

We use the forum / sub-forum structure to organize specific information and the sub-forums are created regularly and also retired.

Our structure would look something like this:

1. Forum1
   1. Forum1(a)
   2. Forum1(b)
      1. Forum1(b)(i)
      2. Forum1(b)(i)
   3. Forum1(c)
      1. Forum1(c)(i)
2. Forum2
   1. Forum2(a)
      1. Forum2(a)(i)

And so on... you get the idea.  Of course our real forums have interesting and descriptive names but this is just for illustration of the issue.

When we set up Forum1 we may not have any sub-forums defined yet and the users will just subscribe to Forum1 e-mails.  All is well in our forum world...

Then a situation causes us to need Forum1(a) to sub-categorize the information and posts... now we have a small issue.  Unless users know to go look for a new forum they don't get subscribed to it and don't receive postings from that forum.

Hmm.  We can broadcast an e-mail or post in the parent forum that they should go look for and subscribe to this forum but that requires additional management and users get a "system" type notice that they may not pay attention to.  Inevitably, at least some of the user base will not subscribe and the problem persists.

As we add more and more sub-forums (and sub-sub-forums) in the course of our business needs, the problem grows.  Soon people are not subscribed to large blocks of sub-forums.

What we need is for the subscription in the branch to be inherited going down.  So if a user chose to subscribe to Forum1, they would be subscribed to each sub-forum that is set up inside the Forum1 branch.

I have not been able to find that this is a feature in the current version of CS but possibly you could enlighten me.  (hoping)

If it is not a feature, it does seem like a useful enhancement.  It doesn't seem unreasonable that a user who subscribes to a parent forum would want to be subscribed to the child forums.  Possibly it could be an option for the user in subscribing to say "... and all child forums".

 

Thanks for taking the time to read this.

Rob Huston