You can subscribe to whole forums or topics. The button for that is right below the Post Reply or Post New Topic buttons. Just go the the topic or Forum you want to subscribe to and subscribe. You can manage bookmarks and subscriptions in your User Control Panel>Overview>Manage Subscriptions. If you subscribe to the entire forum you will get an alert when something is posted.
Edited to add-- We are in the process of getting an email alert database that you can also subscribe to. We will email emergency alerts. Someday texting may be added also.
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