What about a feature that will allow the users to subscribe to categories? Some users may want to see only the topics of a few categories and all of them. I think you should consider this in the future.

that is again a good idea.
and to implement this, it is very straightforward since we already have subscription by reply in place.

This will be a part of 2.3!

I have a very long experience with forums and I know what the users like, or what I would like to use myself.
I see this need when I use a forum. There general forums with a lot of different topics. But not everyone uses all the areas. A subscription model would solve this problem.

This forum http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/forumdisplay.php?f=536 has something like this with the button "Follow Forum".

PS: Another idea would be to add a follow button even for users. Like twitter follow. Someone would be interested in the activity of someone and not in Category basis.

Cheers.

This is our idea :

At the right side of every topic , we will provide an option for tracking .

When clicked it will have a drop down with several options :

1. Muted -> You will not be notified of anything , not even if someone mentions your name

2. Notified -> You will receive notifications on new replies and mentions but no emails.

3. Following -> You will receive notifications as well as emails of new posts made and mentions .

What do you think about this, let us know if we can improve it .

This is ok, but I still think the users should have the possibility to subscribe the whole category too. And if not very complicated subscription on user basis.
Something like this

Hi,

If you subscribe to a whole category, i think we will have to add one more option:

• subscribe only to new topics
• subscribe to all new topics and new posts to existing topics

PS: We are currently implementing subscriptions feature & notifications API in V2.3

We are thinking of integrating the unread counts inside the subscriptions feature too .

So, we will add an option to subscribe in the

1. category page: subscribe to whole category
2. topic page: subscribe to topic
3. tags page: subscribe to a tag

When you click subscribe button in the category page:

• Muted: You will not be notified of anything
• Default: You will be notified of mentions and see "new" label
• Following: You will be notified of new replies/topics/mentions & see unread count of each topic.
• Notified: Following plus you will receive email notifications for the same.

And a checkbox saying, "Apply these settings to existing topics" .

When you click subscribe button in the topic page:

• Muted: You will not be notified of anything
• Default: You will be notified of mentions
• Following: You will be notified of new replies/mentions & see unread count of each topic
• Notified: Following plus you will receive email notifications for the same.

When you are not subscribed , codoforum will set the subscription as 'Default'.
When you post a reply or create new topic the subscription type will be set to 'Notified'.

Can there be any more improvements ?

Linkedin's channels are like the categories here. Look how they handle the subscriptions https://www.linkedin.com/channels/entrepreneurship

Here is a pic of the daily email digest in our subscriptions feature [in development]

What do you think about it ?

Very nice. Thanks