Is there anyway to receive instant notifications for comments and answers?

Questions & Answers
1

I hope it's just my impression since I'm still too new to this whole stackoverflow thing.

For one I do realize there's some RSS support and some e-mail support for alerting notifications.

But I could find none for someone "replying" me on comments! Is this right? I mean, only way would be refreshing the specific webpage! o_O

In almost any forums, such as apple's or any VBBoard, the user is able to subscribe to any topic (similarly questions in here) to receive digest or instant e-mail alerts. A very simple, and critically important feature in my opinion.

In superuser I was lead to believe this is not possible, but there are RSS. Although I can't find RSS for replies. But isn't "answers" separated from it? Can't we have e-mail here? Or at least that RSS working?

Just now, the only notification I've got to see today surely came 26 minutes late!

So, bottom line:

How can we know when someone replied us, in each situation?

Or even yet: How do you do to keep in touch yourself with your stuff in here?

2

For the first question, I'm not sure how exact this site copies stackoverflow.com, but so.com does have the ability to receive notification when someone replies to you in a comment, and puts your name in. Maybe it works here, too, I don't know :)

"You will now get notified of any comments that refer to you by @username in a comment, even if you do not own the post." from:

"How to be notified..."

For the last question: 'How do you do to keep in touch yourself with your stuff in here?" - I think the answer is, add a question to your Favorites page and keep checking back... And that appears to be a design feature of Stack Overflow - they want people to keep checking in periodically, as part of building the community. See:

"Notify more frequently than once a day"

So, given that the Answers site is a copy of StackOverflow - I suspect that instant gratification is off the menu, sorry. :)

John C>

"For all your days, prepare, and meet them ever alike;

When you are the anvil, bear - when the hammer, strike."

3

I couldn’t bother to re-read all this, but I believe all those notification issues were fixed once we moved from StackOverflow Engine to Qato, which might be the best part of this change! \o/