One thing that’s always bothered me about posting stories to sites like Digg is that there’s no easy way to keep track of who’s commenting on your posts. Often times when I post something, I’ll end up leaving the story open in a browser window and refresh it periodically throughout the day to see if there are any new comments. Usually I’ll check it a couple times the day I post it and then rarely ever go back to see if anyone’s posted anything new.

One of the most popular plugins for WordPress is the subscription plugin where you can subscribe to a post and automatically receive email notifications any time someone comments on the post. I use it all the time and it saves me a ton of time. It’s great for when you ask the author a question and don’t want to keep checking back to see if they’ve posted a response yet.

To me it seemed like a no-brainer to add subscription capability to PlugIM and I’m happy to announce it has finally arrived! Earlier this week we wrapped up our testing round and now the PlugIM subscription notification system is in place. You can easily subscribe to any story on PlugIM and you’ll receive an email any time anyone comments on the stories you’ve subscribed to.

There are a couple different ways to subscribe to stories. Every story has a new ‘subscribe’ button under the comment box. Simply click the button to subscribe to the story, you don’t even need to submit a comment. The button uses AJAX to change from a subscribe button to an unsubscribe button so just click it again later if you wish to unsubscribe from the story. The other way to subscribe to stories is to use the automatic story subscription options located in your profile. You can choose to automatically subscribe to every story you post on PlugIM which is a nice easy way to keep track of your own stories. Also you can choose to automatically subscribe to all stories you comment on. Both options are on by default.

I hope you all find this modification useful and I hope it encourages you all to comment more than you do now because that was the driving force behind making the modification. If you have any questions, find any issues or have any suggestions, just post a comment here to let me know.