There is no way for an e-mail notification and no way to search the forum. However, you could open the forum, press control f (command f on a mac) and search for the keyword you're looking for.

Thank you for the swift replies. Do you usually keep track of phases from the home page then? And how do you find older threads?

you can also use google to search through the forum

I always go to the home page and open each game on the right in its own tab and then go through them from the least time left in the phase to the most.

As for the forum, in a google search, you can limit it to just this website by including site:webdiplomacy.net in the search box. But I'm not sure how well that works. I mean, I know it'll limit it to this website, but I'm not sure how well it helps find old threads.

I think the email feature would be very convenient. Why did they remove it? I heard a rumor that it was going to be put back up with the next update(whenever that is), is it true?

I've heard that rumour as well, but not a clue when the next update is due.

Email notifications haven't been around for probably 4 years now? They were removed because the site ends up sending an awful lot of them, and at the time there wasn't an effective way to do this. You would get one for each phase change, which very quickly mounts up!

Perhaps it should be made an opt-in feature?

i just check the site obsessively, like at least 10 times a day. i can't not do it.

These features don't exist, as has been said, however if you want to help develop them, that's the best way to see them come in... This is how variant support happened, for instance.

^^ Disagree with you there Ghost.
This would be incredibly easy to implement. The fact it has not is entirely a matter of choice.

I thought there were issues with server load related to sending emails and that was part of why it was removed way back when?

Forum search can be done via google, and you can look up someone's posts / threads on their profile page.

E-mail notifications aren't there partly for technical and partly for choice reasons: It's pretty hard to get e-mails sending and getting past spam filters reliably, and while sending every notice as an e-mail would be pretty easy it would be a pain to be flooded with e-mails.
It'd be better to have a kind of daily summary of updates, and that's when you get into something that's less trivial to code efficiently (as with any code doing it right is usually more of a challenge than just ticking off a feature)

yeah, just open the site and get notifications that way...

or is there another technology? an rss feed perhaps?

I've noticed that trying to view someone's threads and posts behaves weirdly and is not current.

I would love to be able to set up a separate gmail account to receive emails and use prowl to receive text messages from it. You could have the option to tag certain games, so you only receive messages for those games. (by choice: 1-hour before phase change if you haven't entered orders, notice of phase change, message received.)

The replies and threads pages need paginating... My replies break the server most of the time. I believe that they don't update live due to server load... Maybe Kestas can verify this?

Mine always breaks...