So, I've talked a lot about my seen/unseen features. It's an interesting problem, technically. But it's fairly boring, practically. If you interact or communicate on the Internet, you come across probably a dozen places where this is a "solved" problem. See: email, texting, voicemail, instant messaging (when you click on the window, it's no longer blinks at you), the notifications of missed calls on your phone, etc. The mechanism generally goes like this: something happens, you get a notification, and then the notification goes away, usually never to be seen again.

The idea is, though, that you get notifications in a place where you plan on looking. The problem with idkfa's "notifications" is that you won't always be looking at idkfa. And while there are RSS feeds, they aren't the immediate notifications you might get via other means.

So the question would be: would you want more immediate notifications? By immediate, I mean via email, which I think would be as immediate as I would every want to be yelled at by idkfa.

It would be something like this: you have a set of notification "rules." These rules would be the exact same rules you would use to perform a search (so you could have the same power to do fancy things like you can with the search tool). When a post is made, everyone's rules are checked to see if a match is found to your rule ("Is this post in reply to me?", "Is this post a reply to one of my threads?"). If a match is found, you will be sent an email saying that something happened on idkfa that you might care about.

What do folks think?