Introducing Subscribe. Get notifications for any card.

Previously, you only received notifications for things concerning you. When so-and-so commented on a card or invited you to a board, a little red square with the number of unread notifications popped up in the header to let you know. All your updates are kept in a tidy list that you can always come back to.

The problem was that lots of people wanted to get updates about other cards on the board. Important things tended to get quickly buried in the activity feed. Occasionally people would assign themselves to other cards just to get updates, making it difficult to see who was actually working on what.

There was obviously a problem here. We wanted to keep you up to date, but didn’t want to flood you with notifications about every card on every one of your boards. That would be too much.

Solution? Subscribe!

You can now subscribe to any card. When you subscribe, you get a notification about anything that happens to that card: when somebody comments, when somebody gets added, and when it ceremoniously gets moved to the done list. To subscribe, just click the subscribe button on the back of a card. If you see the green checkmark, you’ll get notifications.

 

You’ll be automatically subscribed when you join a card, just like before, but you’ll also have the option to unsubscribe and turn off notifications. You can also subscribe to cards on public boards to keep track of your favorite upcoming features, like, say, Templates and Copying on the Trello Development board. No need to check back or bookmark the board. When something happens, you’ll know.

That’s subscribe. We hope it keeps people more up to date and helps you keep track of the stuff you’re interested in. It’s live for everybody. Go try it out.

Announcing Announcements

Another thing… In the interest of keeping people informed about all the latest and greatest stuff in Trello, we’ve added an in-app announcement system. When we launch a new feature (like subscribe), we’ll send out an announcement. A little red mark over the ‘info’ button will show up, and you’ll get a short blurb about it when you click. There’s also a place for all recent announcements, in case you want a reminder.

For more more tips, tricks, and news, or to start a meaningful conversation (read: yell at us), you should follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

52 thoughts on “Introducing Subscribe. Get notifications for any card.”

    • Generally there would be some cards(tasks) which are also linked to another board/card of another board,in this case i would like to link a card to another card(on same board/across). Is there any possibility we can have such functionality?
      And one another functionality we would be interested in,generating reports from cards.

  3. Great stuff. However, you are missing a visual indicator that shows whether I have already subscribed to a card. You have an icon for votes. Why not add one for “subscribed?” – then along with the keyboard shortcut “S” you would see whether you have subscribed / unsubscribed from a card.

  4. Great stuff, guys. I’ve just discovered Trello today … and I’ve become a HUGE fan. I mean seriously. It’s a simple and at the same time genius idea. I used stickers on whiteboard at the office, but now I’m collaborating with people from different places and this service should be a life savor for us. AMAZING!

    • Thanks!

      There’s no way to mass subscribe right now. We’ve talked about subscribing to boards and lists, but figured cards should come first (also it’s the easiest).

      • Is there a way in settings for a board admin to “force” subscriptions for certain people? I’d often like to make sure a member gets notifications on a certain card but don’t want to actually assign that person, as its not their task.

        • There is no such setting. If you want to get people’s attention, you can mention them in a comment (use @ followed by their name). It will generate a notification.

      • +1 for subscribe to a list. On our project boards we always include a “Issues & Roadblocks” list. I need to be aware of any changes to that list.

        Trello rocks!

      • I also would like to be able to subscribe to a board. When overseeing a process with multiple team members and not being the one who is creating all the cards, it would be neat to just subscribe to the whole board.

        Good job! :-)

  8. I agree with “s” shortcut and the visual indicator on the board.

    It would also be nice to know who is subscribed to a card within the card. Maybe the same way you display members to which a card is assigned?

  12. Cool new feature and as usual you guys did a great job on the implementation.

  14. Thanks Trello Team! Been waiting for that :D My team is enjoying using Trello for our current project. Works great! :)

  17. Hi Bobby, you are doing such a great job with the development of Trello.
    It totally rocks.

    Subscription to boards and lists, has 2 thumbs up.
    Also the “S” at the front of a card.
    The list of subscribers, and the admin option to subscribe someone to boards lists or cards, sounds brilliant too.

    One thing with the red notification button above the “i”:
    It does not disappear after I click on it. only after dismiss or view all, but I guess that is a feature, right?

    And I know it does not belong here but as I got your attention already:
    If one moves a card, using the move function on the back of a card, a list of lists pops up. Well, after a list has been moved, the list of the lists which pops up is not updated, unless one reloads Trello. If that is so, that might be worth looking into as well.

    Great job.
    all the best,
    Boris

    • We plan on doing board and list level subscriptions in the future. Especially given the response in the comments here.

      In the future, the red badge over the (i) will disappear after clicking. That fix will be out in the next release.

      We’ll look into the move menu thing. Thanks for the report!

  18. Very cool!

    But:

    I’d really like to subscribe to a LIST, so specifically I would like to be notified every time a card has been added to a list I subscribed to. Optionally also to all other events occuring on cards on that list.

    Is that a feature you intend to implement?

    • List and board level subscriptions are something we want to do in the future. We figured cards would be the most important, so we started there.

  20. Regarding announcements, it would be great if you could automatically dismiss or mark announcements as read once you have opened the information window.

    It seems like an unnecessary additional step when you require all users to manually dismiss the announcements.

  21. Kudos on a great product. I’m wondering if you’ve considered doing anything with composite boxes or something similar. I have a board of projects (high level) and individual boards for each project. It kind of works, but there’s no linkage and feels kludgy. (FWIW- I *think* Pivotal Tracker just introduced something like this, though I’ve not looked at the details and may be misreading the feature.) Realize that it’s prob hard to do in a simple way.

  22. This will help out so much making it clearer who is responsible for a task while still allowing supervisors to keep track of where a project is.
    An possible addition to this idea would be to be able to subscribe to the activity of a particular person instead of having to subscribe to each card.

  23. notifications are nice. I’m not sure how useful they are unless “you” are an interrupt driven contributor. an RSS might be more useful.

  24. Awesome update! We have been using trello internally at our agency for over 6 months and it has been great. It’s a great simplified solution to basecamp that is quicker to check and keep up with.

    For the subscribe featured, it would be great if you received a notification for when a task gets checked off, added or updated.

    Thanks!

    • We’re glad you find it useful!

      As for checklist notifications, we know some people would find them useful and some people would find them annoying. It’s hard to find a balance.

  25. Great addition! What about adding a “Subscribe” action to the Card Actions menu?

  26. Is there a way to subscribe non-members? We have clients who want to receive updates and statuses on projects (cards) but who we do not want to have write access to the board/card. Please let me know. Thanks!

    • There’s no way to do that right now. A better solution might to have a ‘read-only’ member type, so they can only see but not write cards.

      • That would be great. Any idea when read-only members might exist?

          • Wait, how am I able to view the Development board read-only? That’s exactly what we’re looking for for our clients. Thanks!

          • You can make it public by going to options > settings > permissions. Everybody will be able to see it that way, though, so there may be privacy issues.