How do I stop the board from automatically setting any particular thread to “Tracking” after simply visiting that thread?
Not every thread does this, and seems to be random. Perhaps this is a bug?
if I want to track a thread, I want to set it to “Tracking” myself.
I don’t think you set a thread to Tracking just by visiting it, at least for me you have to post in it to get it automatically set to Tracking.
If you go into your user profile under Preferences, there is a setting under Tracking/Topics for how you want a thread to be set if you post in it - you can set that to “Normal”. See if that helps?
There is also a Tracking setting for just visiting a thread - mine is set to “Never”.
Go to your profile page, then select “Preferences” from the top-line menu then “+ Tracking” from the second line menu.
That brings up the page labeled “Topics” and “Categories” that @snowthx just described.
The second setting under “topics” is the one that controls whether/how the system reacts to topics you’ve read. The third one is how it reacts to topics you’ve posted in.
Don’t forget to click the [Save Changes] button when you’re done.
I was getting tracking set just by visiting, but it wasn’t consistent. It didn’t occur to me that tracking would be set simply by the length of time I had that thread open.
I did find the “Automatically track topics I enter” setting and I just set it to “Never.” Sounds like this was the culprit.
Thanks to you and LSLGuy!
Now you can go to your [unread] page Unread topics - Straight Dope Message Board and untrack all of them at once by clicking the [Dismiss…] button and then checking the “stop tracking forever” box and clicking the [
Dismiss] button.
If that’s too drastic, start from your [unread] page and click the mini “hamburger menu with checkmarks” icon just left of the word “Topic” at upper left. That will put a checkmark box next to each thread. Then go down and check all the ones you want to un-track, but none of the ones you still want to follow, then click the [Dismiss …] button as per the prior paragraph.
You might have to do this a few times over a few days until all the threads you’ve inadvertantly followed have been revived by somebody and un-followed by you using this procedure.
But real quickly this problem will be behind you.