Following Friends

[Grandma Ruth]

It would be nice to be notified every time a "friend" posts something, regardless of whether you're tracking that particular topic/forum or not. Is there a way to do this?

[Hawk]

As it stands, these are the only options for notifications, which I'm sure you've already seen.

Maybe Gumboots can find a mod for the forum software that will make that happen, or maybe he can figure out how to do it himself.

[Gumboots]

If there's a bug-free extension that does it I don't mind installing it. It's not something I could code myself though.

Edit: Took a quick look. This seem to be the nearest option out of the approved extensions. Haven't looked in the beta/RC extensions yet (and would frankly prefer not to).

It generates a report that is emailed to you: https://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/exte ... extension/

phpBB does not provide the ability to send regular emails to users with summarized postings on a board. Instead, phpBB expects that users will visit the phpBB board regularly if they want to keep up with what is going on at the site or use the phpBB 3 Atom feed feature.

phpBB Digests are emails sent to users periodically with summary of postings made on a phpBB board for discrete time periods. Digests makes some phpBB board users’ lives easier. They don’t have to explicitly visit the site to see what conversations are going on around there. They just read their digest and if there is some topic that seems of interest, they click on the topic link in their email program and start participating! They can unsubscribe at any time. By default, weekly digests are sent on Sundays. The users determines the hour they want to receive the digest. Whatever time they choose, they will always get the latest news so they can pick a time that suits their lifestyle.

Digests can be daily, weekly or monthly. Posts older than this will not be sent in a digest. In addition, if you want you can elect not to see posts since you last logged in, if you visited recently. You can even filter out your own posts.

If a user does not want summaries of every post, they can be selective. They can pick the forum or forums that interests them. By default they will get posts for all forums that they are allowed to access.

Digests can be sent as emails containing HTML or plain text. By default the user gets the entire post as text, but they can also select to see excerpts of each post or get a list of posts with links to each post.

Please note that each digest is unique, and may have different posts in it compared to another digest going out at the same hour. It may not be an appropriate digest solution for very large boards, very busy boards or for those who want to send bulk emails of all posts for a given time period, as it is designed for flexibility, not efficiency.

There are some unusual things you need to do to setup and test this extension, so be sure to check out the FAQ.

I'm not sure I like the idea of having to do "unusual things" to set it up and test it.

[Gumboots]

Ok, as a more or less useful following measure, I have enabled RSS feeds on the forum. This won't allow directly notifying you of posts by members on your Friends list, but will enable receiving notifications of any new content via RSS. Not sure if anyone will use it or not, but there's no harm in having it enabled.

I'm also inquiring about how difficult it might be to code a Friends-posting-stuff notification extension. No answer on that yet, since I just asked, but if it's not too much of a nightmare I may have a go at it.