First, I just want to say that I LOVE wpForo. I started a community back in 2015 using wpForo mainly because I liked how it looked on mobile. Now we're up to 700+ members and 5,800+ posts. It's been a lot of fun.

As more and more people are posting, there is more "stuff" so sift through I'm looking for better ways to help people see the stuff that they care about.

All of my forums are public which is huge because nothing performs search better than Google. I'm able to find what I'm looking for by performing a Google search on the site. But this is REACTIVE.

I'm looking for a more PROACTIVE approach. I have things organized into several Forums by category and this works well because people can look at the Forums that they care about. But one thing I'm learning about online community is that it's about people more than about organization, machine learning, etc. I'm not interacting with a Forum platform primarily, I'm interacting primarily with individual human beings. But I'm doing it publicly on a Forum platform rather than privately in an email so others can chime in if they have something to say. With this in mind, I'm finding that there are certain members that I want to receive a notification from because I want to hear what they have to say, regardless of what Forum they are posting in. It's as if there are sub-communities that exist among friends, people who live in the same area, people who work for the same company, etc.  They don't want to miss anything posted by their sub-community, but they want to communicate within the larger community (not in a separate private forum) in case someone outside of their sub-community can contribute something useful and in case they want to search their past conversations using Google.

We already have the ability to subscribe to a Forum or to a Topic which is great.

It would be really cool if we could also subscribe to a Member (User) so we get notified whenever they post something. This would allow me to achieve the sense sub-community that I'm looking for.

Bonus points if I could have an option to select whether I get notified by email (what happens now) or if I instead want to get notified by the new notification icon in the upper right-hand corner so I don't bombard my email. This would be nice to have for all subscriptions (Forums, Topics, Members).