Many new customers are surprised when they hear from one of their users that they cannot subscribe to a board. They check the Board Options drop down, and see the selection, "Subscribe to this Board," and wonder why the user does not see the same thing.
To begin, it is important to note that there are two types of subscriptions available to users in a Lithium Community, email subscriptions and RSS subscriptions. The Board Option listed above refers to an email subscription. However, by default, this option is only available to Admins and Mods. This selection does not appear for regular users in the Board Options drop down. The option to subscribe to a Thread does appear in the Thread Options drop down for all users.
As an Admin, you can change this behavior by going into the admin console, General Settings, Feature Settings, and deselecting "Turn off board, blog, or idea exchange subscriptions." If you are thinking of doing this, however, we recommend doing this only for specific boards at most, rather than at the community level. Remember, any user who subscribes this way at the board level, depending on how they set their email subscription preferences, could end up getting an email for every reply to every thread on that board. If many users did this it could place a large load on the server.
The better approach would be to encourage your users to make use of an RSS subscription. This option is available to all users in the Board Options drop down - "Subscribe to this Board's RSS Feed." They can use this method to aggregate and monitor content of interest from a variety of sources including the community.
Robb
Robb Lazarus
Customer Success Manager
