Each time you join a community, you'll be prompted to choose whether to receive content notifications from that community. While you can opt-out, choosing to receive notifications makes it easy to stay current on community activity and to promptly engage with new content.

• You can also manage the notifications for each community you belong to from your profile at any time. This is discussed in the Manage your notifications section of this article.
• Super Admins can manage other users' community notifications. See Manage a User's Community Notifications to learn how.

Notification types overview

There are two main types of notifications available:

• Community Notifications - These can include content from across the entire community, which is packaged in a daily and/or weekly Consolidated Digest. At any time (from your profile), you can pick and choose which communities to include in these digests, making them a perfect way to provide an "all encompassing" look at activity across the communities you're most interested in.
• Discussion Notifications - These are specific to just Discussion posts from this community.

NOTE: The Community Notifications section of the popup above displays only if a) Consolidated Digests are enabled on your site and b) you've added at least one of your communities to a digest from your profile. More on this in the Manage your notifications section of this article.

Let's learn more about these two notification types.

Community Notifications

These community digests, which you can receive daily and/or weekly, offer a comprehensive view of ALL community activity from the previous day or week. The content types included in them is configurable by Super Admins at the site level, but they can include new announcements, blogs, discussions, events, library uploads, question and answer posts, and new volunteer opportunities.

• When joining a community, use the dropdowns to select whether to include this community's content in the selected digest emails.

NOTE: Remember: you're not choosing whether to receive these consolidated digest emails; rather, you're choosing whether to include this community's content in the (daily and/or weekly) consolidated digest emails. Further, all of the content (for each community that you "include") in each daily consolidated digest email will also be included in the weekly consolidated digest email.

Discussion Notifications

The Discussion-based notifications that you can choose here enable you to engage with community discussions right from the email message -- without having to even log in to the community.

• Each discussion post in the email is linked to the discussion in the community, so you can reply to a discussion right from the email and your reply will be sent and posted in the community.
• This makes it easy to stay up to date and participate in the conversations happening in each of the communities you belong to.

You have three choices:

• Real Time - Receive a nearly instantaneous email each time someone posts a new discussion or a reply in this community. This is a great option if you want to reply promptly to questions, or you simply want real-time insight into the conversations happening in the community.
• Daily Digest - Receive a single email compiling all of this community's discussion posts from the previous day. These emails are typically delivered between 1:00 and 5:00 am ET (this time frame is not configurable). Depending on your need to keep up with discussion content, these digests are a great choice for busy discussions to prevent your email from being flooded with dozens of messages on a daily basis.

NOTE: At least one discussion post must have been made in the defined time frame to trigger the Daily Digest. If not, you will not receive it. Furthermore, other content types will not trigger it. For example, you will not receive this digest if an announcement was made, an event was created, or a file was uploaded; this notification pertains only to discussions.

Also, this "daily digest" differs from the Daily Consolidated Digest in that it is specific to this community that you are joining; it will not contain Discussion activity from other communities that you have joined.

• Plain text - Similar to Real Time, you'll receive one email for each discussion post, but all HTML formatting will be removed.

NOTE: The Plain text option is only available if enabled on your community site. Super Admins can configure this setting in the Admin Interface, on the Email > Discussions > Email posting settings page. Check out this article to learn more.

• Opt-out - Choose this if you do not want to receive notification emails about new discussion activity. Think of this as turning OFF notifications for this community's discussions.

TIP: Regardless of what you set now (when joining the community), you can change your settings in your profile, as described below.

Manage your notifications

While you're prompted to choose your community and discussion notification preferences upon joining a community, you're free to update them from your profile at any time.

In your profile, navigate to My Account > Community Notifications.

Let's look at each action you can perform on this page.

Manage notifications for each of your communities

At the bottom of the page, in the Notification Settings area, each community you belong to is listed. For each community, you can manage:

• its discussion notification subscription type (via the Discussion Email menu) and
• whether its content should be included in the daily and/or weekly consolidated digest (via the checkboxes).

To make an update, select an option from the dropdown and/or check the appropriate box for the consolidated digests. These updates are immediately applied; there isn't an associated save action.

Set override email addresses for your notifications

By default, all community and discussion notifications are sent to your account's primary email address (this is shown at the top of the page).

If desired, you can set an override email address for both your daily and weekly community consolidated digests AND your discussion notifications.

Set community digest overrides

The process for these two digests is the same:

1. For either digest, click the change link.
2. In the pop-up, enter the email address you want the digest sent to.
3. Click Save.

NOTE: For the weekly community digest, you can also set which day you want the email delivered.

Set discussion notification overrides

You can have the discussion notifications for each community you belong to sent to a specific override address. For example, if you belong to five communities, you can set a unique override address for each of their discussions, have two go to one address and three to another, and so on.

1. Click the add override addresses link.
2. From the dropdown, select one or more communities.
3. In the override email address field, enter the email address you want the discussion notifications for the community(ies) you selected sent to.
4. Click Save.

If you're setting unique addresses for one or more discussions, simply repeat this process.

Enable automatic discussion notification update

Right below the Notification Settings header is a helpful toggle: If set to Yes, a community's discussion notification subscription type is automatically changed to No Email if that community is added to a daily and/or weekly consolidated digest.

While this prevents you from receiving the same discussion notifications in two separate emails (once in the discussion notification and again in the consolidated digest email), be sure you understand the following important distinction: Consolidated digests are different than discussion notifications in two ways:

• Instead of just discussion posts, they compile ALL of a community's content, including library uploads, blog articles, announcements, and events. So, if you want email notifications that only include discussion posts, you'll want to keep a community's discussion notification active.
• They DO NOT provide two important features discussion notifications do: (1) Only previews of Discussion posts are included, meaning longer posts are not shown in their entirety (but you can click the links to view them), and (2) you can't reply to messages directly from a digest email like you can from notification emails.

For these reasons, consolidated digests are typically not the recommended notification type for discussions, especially if you want the ability to reply via email.

Topic Community notifications

If your organization has a Topic Community, you can manage its notifications as well.

See Topic Communities to learn more about Topic Communities and managing its notifications.