The discussion revolves around sending an email notification to all members after a forum’s restoration following a server crash. Timelord seeks advice on the best method, considering individual PMs or a digest email. JammyDodger suggests creating a topic in a dedicated #announcements category set to ‘Watching First Post,’ which would trigger emails to users who haven’t disabled email notifications. alefattorini supports this idea and adds that manually adding users to a ‘all users’ group is another common approach.
Hey gang.
My forum was down for 5-6 months due to a server crash, and my inability to revive it (time constraints). Now that the forum is back up and running, I want to send a notification to the user base that it is back.
What is the best way to do this? Individual PM to each user? A single topic, that will get sent via digest?
Any thoughts would be appreciated.
This may be a little past its prime… 
But depending on how many of your users have turned off their email, a new #announcements style category where you set it to be automatically Watching First Post may do the trick. If you create a topic in there, then an email should go out to everyone who doesn’t have their email set to ‘never’. (and then you can retire the category/remove it from default Watching First Post after it’s served its purpose)
Out of curiosity, how did you handle it in the end?
That’s a great trick! Generally I add manually new users to a big “all users group”!