BuddyPress.org

Ok, obviously there are the possibilitiy of information overflow, but that does not mean you shouldn´t have the option of turning notifications on. In Cartwrights plugin you can choose what you want the users to be notified of. For some bbpress installations, being notified of e.g. forum replies to a topic you started, is feasible – for larger ones they may not be.

Let´s take facebook as an example:

You don´t get notified of every wallpost in a group. Why not? Because you would have 200 new notifications every day if you are a member of a popular group.

But you do get notified if a friends comments on your wall, or if someone comments on a post that you also commented on. This keeps the conversation going and is a good way of keeping up with things you find interesting etc.

Apparantly, notifcations in the buddybar can be done with a plugin, since Andy has made it possible for plugins to plug in to the notifications area. In light of this information I am not advocating this having to be in core. If it where to be in core, I can understand only wanting the notifications to be “citical only”. But as a plugin I don´t see a problem with having the option to allow notifications of comment replies, forum replies etc. An option regarding forum replies could be to have a “do not notify me of furter updates” link if you are not interested in the forumpost anymore.

There is always a fine line with giving people enough info and too much info, but I suggest that it should be up to each admin to decide what works best for his community.

Any more thoughts?