Subscribing to threads

There's been a site-wide change to thread notification.

In the forum configuration parameters is a setting labelled thusly:
By default, send e-mail notifications to participants of a thread

Previously, this was set to Yes. As of last night, it is now set to No.

To receive these you're going to have to either change your default in your Control Panel (change Receive e-mail notifications by default? to YES), or set it individually by thread.

Why the change?

Yesterday, a regular user decided that these messages were unsolicited commercial email aka Spam (despite the link in the messages that allows you to turn them off) and reported them as such to our upstream hosting provider. Said hosting provider treated this as a violation of their Acceptable Use Policy and as a result, they were within hours of shutting down our servers aka taking BT offline, unless we could prove we weren't spamming.

We would like to avoid that scenario in the future, so in order to ensure that people only get thread update notifications because they really want them, we're going to require folks to take specific action to receive them.

People, people think before you act!   It only takes one to screw it up for the rest of us. 

Ignore the above if you occasionally think before you act. 

Too bad we can't electronically remove said users fingernails!!!

Update:

This wasn't a case of a USER reporting us as sending spam, but YAHOO doing so because a member inadverdently subscribed to pretty much everything on the forums all at once. Said member was trying to unsubscribe from thread notifications.

So BT bears some responsibility for this by having an interface that wasn't totally clear and intuitive for what the member wanted to do.

Still, the default of No is probably for the best.

It can be an interesting tightrope to walk, regularly sending out large numbers of legitimate emails that people have requested but not being regarded by the large ISPs as sending spam.