Knowing whether the whole thread has any updates is different from knowing if you've been responded to personally. We have an existing option for the later, but the former sounds quite handy. I can spend even more time at the Monastery. :)

Furthermore, I want to be notified if a given thread has updates. There are several wonderful topics that I may or may not have posted in, but I would love to follow. PM should make the hard things easy. :-)

------
We are the carpenters and bricklayers of the Information Age.

The idea is a little like C++ templates, except not quite so brain-meltingly complicated. -- TheDamian, Exegesis 6

Please remember that I'm crufty and crochety. All opinions are purely mine and all code is untested, unless otherwise specified.

I haven't looked at the code, but this would probably be quite complex.

How do you figure that? Just add in an extra function call whenever a node is posted that checks who's monitoring the node's parents and send a message to those users. Seems straightforward to me :)

Oh yes, look at the parent, get a list of interested people, then look at *its* parent, get a list of interested people, then *its* parent, and so on. Then de-dupe the list, then mail it out efficiently. That alone could get quite expensive.

You also need a database schema change to somehow record a list of people who want to be mailed about posts. Plus the interface for users to add and remove themselves from those lists.