Thread

Is there a way to email every member of the forum whenever a new topic is posted?

You could do that with an extension, but depending on the number of members you have, most hosts would probably not look kindly on that, and would consider it spam abuse of their email servers.  A better option is to educate your users about feeds, and encourage subscriptions to the pertinent forums.  For users who still prefer to get word of a new forum topic by email, there are free services that will take a feed URL and automatically email you new entries as the feeds update.

Edited to add: another alternative, though feeds is still the best way to go, all things considered, as it’s bandwidth and net-friendly, is to use a third party mailing list application, have the users sign up to the mailing list, and key in the mailing list’s submission email address to the forum topic notification preference setting.  That way there is still only one email going out per topic.  Much easier on everyone all around to use my original suggestion, though.

Thanks Derek, these would not be for a public site, just a small intranet forum I’m running. I think looking into the free service is a good idea. I was just wondering if there is an email alias for the membership group.

No, currently, there’s no alias for member groups or internal mailing lists, but I do think there may be an existing feature request for one or both that you are welcome to add your support to.