Email notifications in Drupal 4.6.3

The last thing that I want to enable for this site, is the ability to receive email notifications when something changes.. e.g. a comment is posted, new story, etc. This seemed like an innocuous feature but I wondered why it wasn't included in the main distribution...

So I go over to the handy modules section and looked for email notification. I soon figured out that the drupal jargon keyword is subscription.. and there are three different modules associated with this feature.. ! There is Notify, Subscription and Subscriptions. Of the three, Subscription looked to be the most robust [RANT:this means feature rich people; it has nothing to do with stability!]. So after I install this module I run into some sweet php 5 incompatibilities like the array_merge junk. I end up in a situation where I don't see any errors being logged (in the admin section), and a blank page whenever I try to subscribe to some content. Each of the three modules fails in this way..

Off to the net, to do some searching! I read this and thought at least someone out there got one of these to work.. If I could see DEBUG messages, I probably would be able to make the Subscription module work properly. There are also some open defects submitted for each of these modules, that are in line with what I am seeing. Hopefully, someone will get the time to fix the bugs (make the modules compatible with php 5).

Even if I do get these modules working.. a huge problem remains. None of them allow for anonymous users to subscribe to content! I know everyone likes people to register on their site.. but that just doesn't fit the profile of a person who wants to comment! Most people, myself included, love to just post a comment with my email address and move on. I get an email later saying that someone else has commented, then I go back..simple, clean, easy. Why would I want the hassle of registration? What is a significant benefit to registration? There isn't a benefit on my site to registration (or on most for that matter) so it shouldn't be a requirement for posting.

If I get the urge, maybe I'll dig in and write yet another module regarding notifications/subscriptions.. Maybe I'll write 15 more just for fun.