April and Tom,
I have been researching your question April, about a setting to see when people reply to posts since shortly after you made the post. This is known as 'subscribing' to a thread or to a forum. Here is what the users manual for the bulletin board, referred to for your information as phpBB 3.0, states:
"
Subscriptions are forums or individual topics that you have elected to watch for any new posts. Whenever a new post is made inside an area you have subscribed to, an e-mail will be sent you to informing you of the new addition. To create a subscription, visit the forum or topic you would like to subscribe to and click the 'Subscribe' link located at the bottom of the page."
Unfortunately, I can see no such Subscribe link on my screen. I checked in the settings for our BB and the use of subscriptions for both threads and forums is enabled. I also looked at the screen for when you create a post and there is a list of options below the screen where you type in your post that includes a check box for "Notify me when a reply is posted". I never receive such notifications as an e-mail however. When I log in to the BB, what I do see is that all of the icons at the left of the forums on the index page are tinted orange if there are new posts in that forum. This is managed through your 'cookies' on your computer. If this does not happen on your computer, you might relax the policy setting for cookies. I will check further and try to see what is going on and exactly where this Subscribe link is supposed to be. If anyone does regularly subscribe to threads or forums and has further knowledge of this, please let me know. There are a lot of subtleties to the instructions for the bulletin board operation that I have seen. In typical computer fashion, help files are never very helpful. The people who write them know how things work and therefore think that very little information is needed for someone totally unused to their pet project to understand something that is so clear and simple to them.
For the information of anyone interested, the following link will take you to the instruction manual for administrators, moderators and users of this bulletin board. Good luck in finding anything to match exactly with what you are experiencing. I have found that there are subtle interactions between various levels of settings and things are hidden away in locations that are not so obvious. And comments from people who think that they know how the system operates make it clear that it takes a lot of time and effort to become an expert on the bulletin board system.
http://www.phpbb.com/support/documentation/3.0/Ted