Changes to RLD website notification emails

In keeping up with my work to get this website updated a bit, I made some changes to how the notification emails work. Overall this maybe quite minor but it was necessary to get some backend things fixed and cleaned up.

Subscribing to a topic

How it used to work...

• When you chose to Subscribe to a thread, you'd receive an email whenever that thread got updated. You might have received several emails for multiple topics or if a topic was hot and got updated throughout the day.

How it works now...

• "Subscribe" has been renamed "Follow" because by default you will NOT receive an email if a topic you follow is updated. This basically changes Follow to be a quick link or bookmark that appears on your dashboard when you log in. Convenient to get to those topics you're actively watching.
• You can choose to still receive an email when a followed topic is updated, HOWEVER, this email is now sent out only daily as a digest of topics that were updated. So lets say you follow 5 topics and they all get updated on the same day, you'll receive one email with links to all of them.

New notifications available to everyone

If you check out the Notifications section of your account, you'll see a few new emails that you can opt-in to receive.

• New event daily digest - You will receive one email nightly that contains links to all new events that were created that day. If there are no new events, you won't receive an email.
• Followed topics daily digest - See above. You'll receive on email nightly that contains links to any topics you follow that were updated. If no topics were updated, you won't receive an email.
• Forum activity weekly digest - You will receive one email weekly (Sunday evening) that contains links to all the topics that were created or updated from the past week. 

All of these are opt-in so if any of those sound interesting, check out the Notifications section of your account and update as you wish. You can turn them on and off, so I encourage you to maybe try it out and see how useful you find them. If you don't, just turn it off.

Right now, these emails get sent out around 11PM ET, either nightly or weekly on Sundays. Having a later send seemed to make sense because it would best capture that day's activities plus give people something to review in the morning. I can certainly adjust this schedule but we'll see how it feels this way for a bit.

Given all these changes, it's worth noting that NO CHANGES were made to the emails for private messages. You will still receive an email on-demand as you receive PMs, which could be several a day if you're having a conversation with someone. Nonetheless, receiving these emails is still a choice that you can toggle as you see fit.

Isn't there something better than email? Yes, there is...push notifications to your phone like you have for other apps would be sweet. However, there is no app for RLD so getting an icon badge or notification on your phone home screen like other apps isn't really possible right now. However, I've been researching some ways to maybe get around that but the website as a whole needs a bit of an upgrade to support it, so it's a ways off, but it's a goal nonetheless. A lot of you have asked for something more than email and I hear you. I'd like it too! 

As always, please leave your feedback in a comment, PM, or just shoot me an email. 

And if you experience any problems or something isn't working the way you think it should, please, please send me a message somehow. Don't be quiet about stuff that feels broken or wrong.