Just an FYI note about RSS feeds. You can get an RSS feed for a category, e.g.,
Packages http://discuss.ropensci.org/c/packages.rss
Questions http://discuss.ropensci.org/c/questions.rss
Basically, you just add a .rss on the end of any topical area on the site. For example, you can get an RSS feed for latest posts like
Latest http://discuss.ropensci.org/latest.rss
I imagine use cases for this might be if you don’t want to deal with email notifications, but instead get notifications via an RSS reader.
There is a very long discussion on RSS feeds in Discourse meta.discourse.org at https://meta.discourse.org/t/rss-support-for-categories-topics/2075/72 if you’re interested