When I browse the forums I am usually scanning for threads that are going to tell me something about specific areas I need to learn about (modules, programming techniques etc), or threads started by specific people whose contributions are always worth reading, or threads where I have some knowledge of the subject area and can contribute something.

I guess most people do this, right? At present, the best way to find the threads you are most interested in is to visually scan specific forums, turn on notification for specific forums, or to use Search. What is missing in the Forums, and would make a huge difference, is notification of new posts containing specific keywords (in subject or body), or by specific authors.

With this feature, module developers, or anyone else responsible for a specific area of DNN, could immediately know about and get involved in conversations about their product/area. This might go some way towards eliminating something I see a lot of in the forums which is people starting threads about 3rd party modules which should be dealt directly with the developer/vendor (i.e. product support issues).

What do others think? If there is general agreement (or no response at all!) I will post the feature request in Gemini.

I agree - notification of any new content on the site containing my favourite keywords is better than Forums only. That way new blogs, announcements or whatever could be captured.

The question is - if the notification function is not fired by a particular event in a module (e.g. saving of new post), then what should fire it? Should it be built into the Search indexer, so after a scheduled reindex the index is queried for the favourite keywords of user X that are within content that is newer than date Y - the date the last notification for X was sent? Or should there be a separate scheduled task to query the index? Or is there some generic way that DNN can detect "save" events that modules generate, and run notification based on that?

Might querying the search index on a regular schedule place too much load on the server? I say this only because I have heard complaints that the search indexer in itself uses a lot of resources.

Chris - I'll recreate this thread in the Search forum if you prefer.

So it sounds like there are two possible models for implementing notification:

Event Driven model

This is what you were describing in your last post I think. The events are raised at the module level and handled at the DNN level. The user's preferences (i.e. keywords they want notification of) are stored in their profile.

Question - how does DNN "listen" for these events? I don't know enough about the DNN framework to figure out how this could be done. When a module raises an event can DNN instantly respond to that?

Search Index driven model

The indexes generated by the search indexer are periodically scanned by a scheduled task for content matching users' keywords. Again the keywords users want notification of are stored in their profile.

Did I understand you correctly?