The alert system is mostly fine and helpful for keeping up with topics. The one problem I have with it though is that if you have more than 8 threads being watched at once it will only alert you of new posts for the most recent threads you’ve been in. Just now when I logged in I saw that the MVC3 Tournament and stream thread had new posts shown under “Recently Active Threads” but it didn’t show up in my alerts. This is not a major grievance by any means, but if it could be fixed somehow, that’d be nice.
It’ll only notify you of new unread posts. If you get notified of new posts, but dont read them, it doesn’t notify you again until you go into the thread and catch up.
If you’re afraid youve missed notifications on subscribed threads, hit the ‘Mark All Forums Read’ link in the upper left under ‘Forums’. That’ll mark everything as read, so you’ll be notified of any posts in threads you’re subscribed to after you hit that link.
Many thanks for sharing this nice information. 
Sorry to necro this, but I figured it’d be better than making a brand new thread and I was having trouble figuring out where I should ask this:
Is there a way to have my new post alerts still show up on the site without getting the email notification that goes along with them? I love having the alerts but it’s a lot of emails to go through and delete, in the dashboard it seemed that my only options were to have both or neither. Thanks and sorry if this is misplaced.