On my Unread tab, I’ve got threads I no longer wish to follow. Is it possible to stop tracking a thread once it’s automatically tracked?
I’m on mobile if it matters.
Go down to the bottom of the thread and there is a block that says Normal or Tracking, click on it and choose Muted.
Perfect. Thanks!
You don’t even need to go to the bottom. The little bell icon to the right of the infinite scrollbar does the same thing. (It disappears when you scroll down far enough for the button to be on the screen.)
You don’t need muted. Muted is “affirmatively ignore”. Yes, the thread disappears from your unread list, but Muted also blocks notifications if you’re quoted or mentioned in the thread. That’s probably overkill.
If you select Normal that resets the thread to be the same as any other thread you’ve never noticed or read or posted to. It becomes just one more thread in the ginormous pile of 10s of thousands of threads you’re paying no attention to.
I often set threads I’ve read or posted to back to Normal if my interest wanes before everyone else’s does.
Oh, sweet! Maybe I can use Muted to get threads out of my Subscribed Threads list.
I was so happy to finally find that feature, but started to get bummed out as I realized that my occasional post in very long, ongoing threads I’m not really interested in means I get those threads clogging up my list seemingly forever more.
Sadly, muting a thread does not remove it from the posted list, which is the closest thing this board has to a Subscribed Threads list. I’ll make a mental note to avoid posting in long-lasting threads unless I’m invested in the topic.
Try Unread (now visible again at the top of the page if you’re looking at categories or latest or whatever.)
I think – though it occurs to me that I haven’t tried it – that setting a thread back to normal will remove it from the unread list; while setting your preferences to put everything you posted in as tracking will turn ‘unread’ into something very like the ‘posted’ list.
The problem is my 10,000+ posts during the vBulletin days. My personal requirements for a Subscribed Threads feature include all of the following:
- Any thread I post in now gets “Subscribed To”
- Any thread I ever posted to back in the vBulletin days is also “Subscribed To”
- Threads that I just read for 10 minutes but have not posted to must not be included because they would drown out the ones I posted in. I don’t post in most of the threads I read.
Because the default behavior for discourse is to lump together threads you read and threads you post to, every legacy thread from before discourse is permanently marked as the same as “just read, didn’t post” threads.
The “posted” list is the only possible way to get only a list of threads you posted to, and unfortunately it doesn’t let you add and remove threads from the list like vBulletin did.
To clarify, that was a problem with the transition, not necessarily discourse itself. If all subscribed threads from the old boards had been marked as Watching instead of Tracking, and if they set everyone’s default behavior of posting in new threads being marked as Watching instead of Tracking, then it would work great.
Unfortunately that’s not how it went down. Based on how the transition was actually done, "posted’ is the only way to get a functional substitute for Subscribed Threads that 1) includes legacy threads and 2) doesn’t include read-only (not posted) threads going forward.
That was driving me crazy until I was told (I forget by who) that you can adjust it in preferences.
In your account, in preferences, go into notifications. Set ‘automatically track topics I enter’ to ‘never’ (you may have to scroll through to see ‘never’ as an option and the scroll bar may be faint and hard to see.) Set ‘when I post in a topic, set that topic to’ to ‘tracking’.
You’ll then automatically track every thread you post into, and not track threads you only read.
Individual threads can be set at the bottom of the page for that thread, so if you want something you posted to ages ago to stop showing up as tracked, it should be possible to set that thread to normal. If you’ve got hundreds of such, it would take a while, though.
Thank you for all the useful information.
I hope it’s actually useful!
That would also meet my criteria, yes. Nicely done, and thanks much for explaining it.
My method – posting to a thread sets it to Watching, and I use the “posts” link as bookmark to the boards to catch zombies – turns the avatar menu into a pretty darn functional interactive Subscribed Threads list, and I gotta say, it’s pretty cool. Plus I still get the Unread feature to see new posts in threads I only read, which is also pretty cool. The downside is that the posts list (for catching zombies) can’t be altered; you can’t “unpost” a thread to get it out of that list. (Muting doesn’t work.) So if a thread you don’t care about drags on for months or years, it’s taking up screen space that whole time.
The method you outline – turning off the “read but didn’t post” feature entirely – would let me easily add and remove threads from my list. That would be huge. Also treats current threads the same as legacy threads, also huge. The downsides are that the avatar menu loses much (most, IMO) of its Subscribed Threads utility, and of course you sacrifice the ability to track read threads altogether.
I think my appreciation of the coolness of the new features (avatar menu is a popup Subscribed Threads list, Unread posts shows threads I only read) overrides my need to get those never-ending threads I now regret posting to out of my subscribed threads list, so for now I’ll stick with posting = watching.
But if those undead threads get the best of me I can switch over to the way you describe easily enough. Thanks again!