Upon joining a community, you'll be prompted to choose whether you want to receive notifications from that community. While you can opt-out altogether, choosing to receive notifications makes it easy to stay current on community activity and engage promptly to new content like discussion posts.

NOTE: Super Admins can manage users' digest emails, Discussions emails, and notifications settings as described in Manage a User's Community Notifications.

Notification types

These notifications come in two forms: community notifications and discussion notifications. At a high level, community notifications include activity from across the community while discussion notifications are specific to just discussion posts. 

NOTE: The Community Notifications section of the popup only displays if a) Consolidated Digests are enabled for your community and b) you've added at least one of your communities to a digest from your profile.

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. They include new announcements, blogs, discussions, library uploads, and new volunteer opportunities.

When joining a community, use the associated dropdown to select whether to include this community's content in the daily or weekly digest (or both).

NOTE: Keep in mind: You're not deciding whether to receive a unique daily or weekly consolidated digest for each community you join; rather, when joining a community, you're choosing whether to include its content in the daily and/or weekly digest. In other words, there's a singular daily digest email and a singular weekly digest email that include content from each community you add to them.

Discussion notifications

While joining a community enables you to participate in its discussions online, choosing a discussion notification subscription type enables you to both post and receive messages directly from your email without even having to log in. This makes it easy to stay up to date and participate in the conversations happening across the communities you belong to.

You can choose one of three discussion notification types:

1. Real Time - Receive a nearly instantaneous email each time someone posts to the discussion. This is a great option if it's important for you to reply promptly to questions and/or you simply want real-time insight into the conversations happening in a community. 
2. Daily Digest - Receive a single email compiling ALL discussion posts from the previous day. Delivery time for these emails is generally between 1—5 am EDT (this time frame is not configurable). Depending on your need to keep up with discussion content, digest notifications are a great choice for busy discussions to prevent your email from being flooded with dozens of messages on a daily basis.
3. Opt-out - Choose this if you do not want to receive notification emails about new discussion activity. Think of this as turning notifications OFF for a community discussion.

Manage your notifications

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

From 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, each community you belong to is listed. For each, you can manage:

• its discussion notification subscription type
• and whether that community's content should be included in the daily and/or weekly consolidated digest (if these digests are enabled for your community).

To make an update, simply select an option from the dropdown and/or check the appropriate box for the consolidated digests. These actions apply the update immediately, and no additional save action is required.

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).

You can set an override email address for 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 to the right.
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 to the right.
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:

• 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, manage its notifications in the Topic Notifications area.