Am I missing something, or does this feature just not exist?

I never use a feature like that but what happens when you use the 'Subscribe to this topic' checkbox at the bottom of the 'Leave a reply' section?

You'll see the orange bell icon in the right hand side of the main menu light up with a count of notifications. Clicking on it gives you a dropdown of all the new posts to threads you've subscribed to.

That all works perfectly, but on most forums there's an option to email, so you get the email, click the link and it takes you to that thread. That seems to be absent here. I don't know if it's by design or if (because I think the forum was recently redesigned) they just haven't gotten around to it yet.

You'll see the orange bell icon in the right hand side of the main menu light up with a count of notifications.

That's odd - I get those orange bell icons all the time but I've never used the 'Subscribe to this topic' checkbox.

I was hoping that would do the 'send email' thing.

This incarnation if the forum is fairly new so I don't know everything about it.  The previous forum platform had no means to receive updates via email.  That doesn't directly answer your question but provides some context.

Posted by: Chris Duncan

↑

Hey, guys.

On literally every other forum I'm active on, I can subscribe to a thread and get an email when there's new activity. Here, I can see the notifications at the top when I visit the site, but in edit profile I can't see any option to enable email notifications.

Am I missing something, or does this feature just not exist?

Hey Chris…this is Chris N from the Yamahamusicians.com

As said this iteration of the forum is new and was a long time coming. I don’t know if this has anything to due with no email notification preference. I had just joined here when it was taken offline back in October so I never got to know that version. I don’t know if it has just not been implemented yet or it’s on purpose. I have seen it mentioned elsewhere features like that make hacking the forum easier. I know you probably know more about development…maybe you can tell me. Is that true/plausible?

It seems many corporations and businesses are putting much less budget (like it seems they one guy to keep it running) in their user forums and have opted to make them lean and definitely avoid anything that will get the forum hacked. I agree that this is feature that was/is always common and I rely in some part on it. 

Posted by: Christopher

↑

Hey Chris…this is Chris N from the Yamahamusicians.com

I have seen it mentioned elsewhere features like that make hacking the forum easier. 

Hey, Chris.

I have a Kemper, and this past month their entire website got taken down hard, offline for something like a week, and the culprit appears to have been the forum. However, I don't know anyone on the dev team there so I can't say what the vulnerability was.

One of the reasons I've never had forums on the websites I develop isn't technical, but rather the fact that I don't want to spend my entire life in moderation hell because anonymous people can't behave themselves. If I wanted to be a babysitter I'd buy a poodle skirt. 🙂

Posted by: Jason

↑

The previous forum platform had no means to receive updates via email.  That doesn't directly answer your question but provides some context.

That's actually useful info, and makes me think that it's just something they don't want to do.

Posted by: Chris Duncan

↑

One of the reasons I've never had forums on the websites I develop isn't technical, but rather the fact that I don't want to spend my entire life in moderation hell because anonymous people can't behave themselves. If I wanted to be a babysitter I'd buy a poodle skirt. 🙂

LOL, I get it, especially in today’s atmosphere.

Regarding the original subject, email notifications:

This forum is built upon wpforo.  This is what wpforo mentions about the email capabilities of the native forum (without additional plugins):

https://wpforo.com/community/wpforo-integration/email-notifications-for-users/

Not saying these are implemented or not, but it speaks towards what could be available.

... And with plugins there may be more capabilities.

Yeah, I can't imagine that someone would write a forum from scratch when there are so many open source options available.