Information about setting up a Moodle forum (discussion board) is available from the Moodle documentation here: http://docs.moodle.org/24/en/Using_Forum
Subscriptions
Subscribing to a forum means that you will receive an email every time there is a new post to the forum. Instructors can change the default behavior of subscriptions to a variety of settings. From the Moodle documentation:
There are 4 subscription mode options:
- Optional subscription - Participants can choose whether to be subscribed
- Forced subscription - Everyone is subscribed and cannot unsubscribe
- Auto subscription - Everyone is subscribed initially but can choose to unsubscribe at any time
- Subscription disabled - Subscriptions are not allowed
To see who is subscribed to the forum, go to the forum and click Settings → Forum Administration → Show/edit current subscribers.
News Forum
The News Forum is a special forum used for class announcements. Only instructors can post to this forum and everyone is forced to subscribe to this forum.
To remove the news forum from the front page, see Deleting the Announcements Forum