How about an explanation (in the FAQ?) of the various options for email notification.
Apparently, at the forum level, you can set up notifications for any new topic, or any new post. Also, at the topic level, you can set up notifications for any new post. And at the post level, you can set up notifications for any reply to your own post.
What I haven't seen is a way to set it up so that I am automatically notified of any post to any topic in which I have posted, including those which are not replies to my own post, without setting options in each topic or post.
I did a quick search on the Community Server site, but came up empty.
My understanding is that when you post and have enabled email notifications in your profile, it will automatically subscribe you to notifications for that topic/thread from that point. That is, it sets up a subscription to that topic/thread for you, which you can turn off/on by clicking the Email Subscription Enabled/Disabled at the top of the thread.
Recently, I seem to be getting a lot of email notifications for replies in threads where I haven't replied and I haven't enabled a subscription. This happens most in the webgrid forum.
I checked my settings, and in the WebGrid forum, my email is set to "When new posts are posted in this forum". In the parent Grids forum, my email setting is "never".
This is no big deal, but I do try to give priority to people who respond to my posts; if this worked as expected, then I could use the "Re:" in the suject line to spot people who reply to one of my "if you post your code I'll look at it" posts. The other, less obvious reason that I care about this is because I'm forming an opinion as to how glitchy the community server product is. If this is your fault, I'm more likely to recommend their product to a client than if it's their fault. <grin>
Ed, it is difficult to say for sure. I'm pretty sure we're not doing anything custom regarding the email stuff. It is possible we don't have something configured quite right, but if that's the case, you could still argue it is a CS problem because it shouldn't be hard to configure it right. :) I don't know what you're stacking CS up against, but I'd still recommend it over other options in its space, particularly if you need a .NET-based solution.
I sent this on to the Web guys (I'm no longer in charge of that), but please understand they have a ton on their plates.
FWIW, what I'm comparing your forums to is mostly other companies less user-friendly implementations of the CS product. I've yet to identify any attractive implementation of a competing product, (largely because these products allow companies to replace the forum's brand with the client's brand).
You could tell the Web Guys that I said they should jump right on it as soon as they finish up everything on their agenda that's actually important. ;-)