Notifications and Email

Forum Pro's notification system has one job: tell members what they care about without flooding them.

The bell

Signed-in members get a notification bell in the member toolbar with a live unread count. It covers:

• Replies to topics they are watching
• Quotes of their posts
• @mentions
• Activity in watched forums
• Moderation decisions on their content
• Badges they have been awarded
• Their answer being accepted as the solution

{forum}/notifications lists everything with a one-click jump to the post and a mark all read action.

Live toasts

With live updates enabled, a small card slides in the moment a reply, mention or private message arrives. It names the sender, previews the message for PMs, and links straight to the post or conversation.

Burst coalescing

Twelve replies in a watched topic produce one bell entry, not twelve. This is the difference between a notification system people keep on and one they turn off in week two.

Watch levels

Members set a watch level per topic and per whole forum from a picker that explains each level:

Members auto-watch topics they start or reply to. That default is adjustable in their settings, so someone who answers a lot of questions is not signed up for every thread they touch.

Email

Email mirrors the bell, per member preference, and is configured by each member in {forum}/settings:

Per-type toggles let a member take mentions immediately and everything else in a digest.

email:
  throttle_minutes: 15   # at most one notification email per member per topic per window

Every email carries a signed one-click unsubscribe link, so a member can stop a specific stream without logging in.

Delivery

Notification mail is queued and drained by the background worker, with retry and backoff on failure. Two properties matter:

• Messages are individually addressed. Forum Pro never puts your members on a BCC blast, so one bounce never exposes the list.
• Sent payloads are purged on a schedule (retention.purge_sent_emails_after_days, 7 days by default), so your database does not accumulate a copy of every notification ever sent.

Check delivery health in Admin → Forum → Status, which reports pending, failed and completed job counts.

Private messages

{forum}/messages is a full member-to-member messaging system.

messages:
  enabled: true
  max_participants: 5           # people per conversation, including the starter
  max_threads_per_hour: 10      # 0 disables
  max_messages_per_minute: 10   # 0 disables

• Conversations are one-to-one or group, up to max_participants.
• An envelope in the toolbar carries a live unread count, and new replies appear in an open conversation without a refresh.
• Archiving splits the inbox into active and archived views.
• Bulk archive and delete with select-all-on-page and a select-all-N option, which is how you clear thousands of migrated messages while sparing a handful. Select everything, untick the few you want to keep, then delete the rest.
• Blocking stops new conversations and direct replies in both directions.
• Messages are reportable to moderators, who see only the reported message, and that access is written to the audit log.

Attachments in private messages use the same upload stack as posts, so the same size and type limits apply.

Provisional members and messages

With provisional.block_messages: true (the default), brand-new accounts cannot start private conversations. This closes the most common spam vector on a forum with public member profiles. See Spam protection.