Create a new course and enrol a student Create four forums in the course - one of each subscription type Subscribe your user to each forum (it is possible to subscribe a user to a subscription disabled forum) Post in each forum and ignore maxeditingtime Configure your site to use mailcatcher (or have working e-mail) Run the forum cron task: php admin/tool/task/cli/schedule_task.php --execute="\mod_forum\task\cron_task" Look at the footers in each received e-mail and confirm: Optional: Subscriptions links are present Automatic: Subscriptions links are present Forced: Subscriptions links are not present Disabled: Subscriptions links are not present The case where users are subscribed to subscription disabled forums is very rare. I didn't feel it was worth doing adding the links back in these cases.