Sandbox

Is there any way that notifications can be set differently for the Announcements forum to the other boards?
For example, forum members may well want to recieve notification of responses to threads without getting the entire message in an email BUT  may want to receive the entire message of any announcements.
Currently, the system allows only global settings.

Can this be tweaked so the Announcements board operates differently to the rest of the fourm?

Also, it occurred to me that there may be media or others who are not users of Joomla who may want to keep abreast of any news.  Making them register could be a barrier to them.  Have you considered making the Announcements board a public forum to which anyone can subscribe without needing to register on the forums?

SMF does not have an option currently for this. However users can choose to receive the contents of posts, or not, as you are aware.

SMF does allow an announcement to be emailed to all users of the forum, but we feel that would be violating the privacy of users if we were to do it each time we made a new announcement. As well as that, it would lead to our servers invariably being tagged as SPAM sources.

That being said, the forum allows a RSS feed, this is how most media/others who don't actually visit are kept up to date.

For more info please see: http://forum.joomla.org/index.php/topic,512.0.html