most basic and embarrassing question- after way too much time to admit to spend searching, i still can’t manage to figure out how to subscribe to a thread. I looked for the ‘menu to the top right’ of the thread but can’t find it… please don’t kick me out for stupidity…
On the left below the last comment made there’s a series of blocks or buttons in grey, one should say Normal and have a bell on it. If you click that you get a dropdown to select how to be notified of new posts, or to mute the thread entirely.
Thank you SO much!!!
You don’t have to go all the way to the bottom of the thread, actually. Immediately underneath the post scroller at right is a little “bell” icon. Click this, and you get the same “watching” (i.e. subscribed/following) options as the dropdown at the end.
Edit to add: Don’t feel bad about overlooking this. It took me a couple of months before I noticed the bell myself and decided to click it out of curiosity. Duh. (The basic design principle in Discourse is, everything does something when you hover and/or click it, but what that actually might be is rarely obvious or intuitive.)
It doesn’t help that “subscribing to a thread” is not a phrase Discourse uses. It’s a carryover from the previous forum tool
So if you look for “Subscribe” anywhere in any of the thread controls (and there are a lot of them), you won’t find it.
ahhh, thank you! that makes me feel much better. the bell seems so obvious now!
that’s exactly why I was having trouble!
And if you post to a thread, it automatically puts it on “tracking” so you’ll get reminders.
If you’ve got a thread on “tracking” and you get bored with it, or don’t like the turn it’s taking, you can click on the bell and turn it back to “normal”. Then you won’t get reminders.
I believe it just calls them notifications, and the setting is about how you will be notified about changes to a thread. Which is really just a description of how a thread subscription works, but the different terminology can be confusing for sure.
ETA: Even more confusing, in your account preferences for Discourse, there are separate settings for “Notifications” and “Tracking” which are very similar and related to each but not the same thing. It’s the “Tracking” section that covers what the old board called thread subscriptions.