The issue with the e-mail idea is that the hundreds of thousands of e-mails that would go out would take days. Plus there already are servers that had considered Berkeley's last mass e-mail as SPAM, and blocked them. Plus there are so many who forget to update their e-mail address that it becomes a hassle with all the bouncing.

Nope e-mail will not work.

I am thinking this one-off was short notice to them. Since it was only announced a few hours before it happened, they probably did not have much time to react.

As for pushing more down, your settings state how much you want, if they change that and people see they have more work than they request, they'd blow up, and start aborting work.

You do not need to come to the site daily, if you get an RSS news reader, and subscribe to the feed from SETI. This usually has those alerts as soon as they go online. Then you would know.

Other than that, it's pretty impossible for them to make other types of notifications.