I guess what I’m looking for is a happy medium “in the middle” setting.
I guess I can see why a fully private email might be useful for certain circumstances.
However, if I’m running a public forum, I want people / members to keep returning as much as possible. If they are getting the full content of other peoples replies to the topic they’re subscribed to, within the emails, they’re less likely to come back to the site to view them and continue the conversation (if you don’t have the reply by email option enabled I mean).
So there’s a less likely chance they might continue the conversation in the forum and/or make new posts whilst they’re there helping to expand the forum posts and other discussions etc.
In such a case, just including the title of the topic and a little message saying new replies have been made in the email body, click here to check them out… would encourage them back. Something editable would be awesome.
The private setting seems to be an extreme version of doing this and doesn’t work well for the above scenario as people getting those emails (general forum users) aren’t even going to be able to figure out why they’re getting them i.e. it mentions a topic ID in the title which really means nothing to them.
I hope that makes sense.