Mandy has written a very useful post on how to subscribe to our blogs using RSS feeds.
Her post raised the question of receiving e-mail notifications when blogs are updated.
As you may know, the only way you can "subscribe to" or be notified when new posts are made to a ClusterBlog is to have a registered ClusterBlog account and to sign up for notification. Currently, the only registered users on this site are the bloggers themselves.
We disabled ordinary user registration when we originally set up the blogs, as it was designed as a small pilot project for Kent users only and any new users would need to be checked and verified for their suitability to post and comment on our blogs without being moderated. Most bloggers on this site, I know, have the "anonymous comments" turned off to prevent a variety of unsuitable spam, and have any comments made to their blogs moderated before publishing them.
Another simple issue with user registration is that it requires a large amount of staff resource to verify all would-be users and then to approve their accounts. We already manage over 5000 ordinary ClusterWeb registered user accounts, which being in a different software would not have automatically linked into the blog user registration system. It's not something we could have managed effectively when we started, and so it's currently not available.
I'm hoping to review how the registration system on ClusterWeb as a whole (including web 2.0 applications like the blogs) works this year, and would value your opinions. In the meantime, subscribe to us using RSS! As Mandy has said, it's quite simple.
Also: we're trying to upgrade to the next version of Community Server soon. I'll keep you updated.