I’m not sure if it was aa glitch or an errant touch, but I just recently noticed that the BBQ Pit Category was switched to tracking. And, even though I noticed and switched it back to Normal, still nearly every topic (thread) in that category is listed as “Tracking.”
I have no desire to track any BBQ Pit topics (or really any topics in general. I either use Watch or Normal). And I can’t figure out a way to easily turn them all off. Going through every single topic is not a viable option.
I don’t think this is how it should work. Setting a flag on the Category should not touch any of the individual flags on a topic. But, if it did, it should work both ways, whether I choose “Tracking” or “Normal.” So I think there’s a glitch going on.
Regardless, I just want a way to untrack the hundreds of threads. I have no desire to see that blue number. I don’t find it useful to know how many posts I’ve not read in a Topic, and the blue draws the eye. I’d rather see the full post count.
How many are listed in your Unread tab? If it’s not too many, just go there, scroll to the bottom, and dismiss them. Don’t forget the stop tracking checkbox.
ETA: You don’t even have to scroll to the bottom anymore. There’s a Dismiss button on top, too (at least on my device/theme).
Okay, that seems to have worked. I had hundreds of posts marked as tracking, but there was a Dismiss button on top, and it did have the checkmark about removing “Tracking.” I did have to reload the page to be able to click on the Dismiss button in the dialog, but then it did erase them all.
But that was not at all intuitive. I would expect that I’d deal with removing the Tracking indicator in the preferences about Tracking, not in a tab called “Unread,” which I would have assumed would just show all unread Topics, regardless of whether they have been tracked or not.
I still don’t think that, even if I accidentally marked a Category as “Watched” that every single Topic in that category should have also been marked as “Watched.” What if I had some Topics I had watched before that I wanted to keep Watched, but no longer wanted to watch the whole Category?
Still, thank you, @GreysonCarlisle for telling me how to go back to normal. That lets me work around the issue.
(Also, it’s likely unrelated, but my computer just hard froze in the middle of this post. I couldn’t even fix it with the Reset button or by pressing and holding the power button. I had to switch off the power supply and wait 30 seconds to turn it back on.)
I think that you can also futz around with the settings in Preferences >> Notifications to control some of that behavior, but that’s equally as nonintuitive.
It didn’t work as well as I thought. It looked like it cleared them, but the Tracking randomly seems to come back when new posts are made in certain threads.
I originally thought it was just in older threads, but it doesn’t seem to be. Something is screwed up and setting me as Tracking in Pit threads.
Just a bump to say this is still happening. Any Topic (thread) that gets bumped from a long time ago is set to tracking by default. I can’t seem to make it where I don’t track Pit threads.
I would like to be able to do that. Heck, I’d like it if there was no way to accidentally set all Topics in a Category as Tracking. Have it be a flag on the Category itself.
If anyone has a solution to keep newly resurected Pit threads from getting Tracked (that little blue circle), I’m all ears.