Bryan Sammers

That's a fair solution. Most topics you want to subscribe when answering, but some topics you "are done with" when answering them :D

Brandon, you are right. I can only vote for my situation :D In fact the best thing I ever programmed is having your simple "Watched Content" list above the forums. To be fair, it just puts *any* information from the script usercp.php and displays it completely like that on the top of all forums. That easy, and that powerful. That increased user traffic a lot - as you might think. Important is that the user knows there is something new, and he interacts as fast as possible. Having 50 participants online within a five minute period is different than having 50 participants coming on any time in the day and look if something is new. Therefore the notification system (be it an email system - I activated that by default, or the Watched Items list). I do like very much that IPB has Watched Items as standard - the other forum software does not have it!

Thanks for taking participation in this thread, Mark. For possible vbulletin switchers as me - that feature is expected to be within IPB. We do make money from our community and the money comes from lots of visitors. There are more visitors the better the notification system is (also the SEO etc but thats taken care of). Well I can argue about the great design or philosophy behind IPS, I do care about my income. I do not have any "maximum number of emails I can send per hour" as I have dedicated server and a server management team babysitting it. I see that there are some restrictions from webhosting. Therefore: Whether or not this feature is activated in the admin panel is up to the admin.

That is a feature I'd also desperately need.

You can use "registered users" (the standard members group) for new members and then promote these members once they reached a quantitative criteria that you can choose in admin area (that would be the automatic solution) or any criteria that you can not set to automatic - in the last case you would have to promote them by hand.

As a possible switcher from vbulletin vbseo to ipb the seo features of the 3.1 release are important for me. Do you think is more likely, that IPB comes out in Q1/2010 or that it would come out later? Thanks.