Is there any way to set my account permanently to Normal instead of having to manually change it from tracking or whatever? I don’t want to ever track how many people post in any given thread, I am only interested in replies [I can manually check interesting threads myself]
Go to your Profile > Preferences > Notifications
You can change “Automatically track topics I enter” to Never.
You can also change “When I post in a topic, set that topic to” to Normal, if you want to.