How to manage your subscriptions

Today we went to hiking to the mountains. After we got back to the dormitory, I met Mark who told me he also would join us if only he knew. I asked him if he saw Stanislav's announcement about hiking and Mark said he did but only after we had left. So we discussed with him how to avoid this kind of situations in the future and Mark asked if I could make a subscription to the website, so that it automatically sends notifications to e-mails when something's published. Mark told me that his messenger programm automatically pops up in his monitor and that way would work best for him.

I think that Mark's idea makes good sense and that probably other smillies too would love subscription thing. So I have just activated subscription function and from now on every user of the website can subscribe to any post, forum threads, comments or content types. Here comes confusion - what is what?

Suppose, you saw very interesting forum thread and you'd like to be notified on further comments in it. Then you should definitely subscribe to that thread. The same way with blog posts - if you see someone posted an interesting article in his/her blog then you can subscribe to it so that to be notified if new comments will be added to that post. But this way you only subscribe to seperate posts and threads and only to them. In other words you have to subscribe to every new post if you would like to follow.

What if you would like to get an email notification on literally ANY UPDATE on the website? Then you need to subscribe not to different posts, but to content types. For instance, you could subscribe to blog content type and in this case you will be notified on any blog submissions of any user.

We have several content types on our site and they are blogs, forums, polls, newsletters and images. There is no need to subscribe to newsletters, since they are sent to e-mails by default. Images are rarely updated. So we have two most frequently used content types: forums and blogs. Now, if you would like to get email notification when anything added to forums or blogs, then:

1) go to your account,
2) select "my subscriptions",
3) select "content types" and select content types you would like to subscribe to.

I hope it was not too much complicated explanation.