Did you know that at the bottom of every thread is a little dropdown that allows to change your notifications on the thread? You can change a thread you’ve created from “Watching” to something else so you stop getting notifications on every post. And you can change a thread you like to “Watching” so you can see when somebody has posted.
I swear this is not just a convoluted 55,103,181D chess move as part of my plot to destroy humanity with killer robots. I mean hypothetical plot, that doesn’t exist.
I have been using it for just over 2 years. When I lose interest in a thread, often as soon as it is posted, I mute it so that it never appears again in latest or categories. Makes life very simple.
You can also adjust your preferences so every thread you read automatically becomes “watching.” I do that. Then if/when the thread veers off into stupid or uninteresting I reset the thread itself to “normal.” If a thread I’m tracking dies out after awhile it just sits there quietly and invisibly until /unless somebody revives it later. Then it suddenly reappears in my Unread queue. But by default, once I express interest in a thread I’ll be notified via the Unread list whenever it changes.
Done my way, Doping consists of checking New for threads I’ve never seen before, opening the ones that look interesting, then ignoring the remaining New ones I don’t care about by using the [Dismiss] button on the New page. Thereafter I just live in my Unread list until a few hours later, conversing with whoever about whatever, refreshing the Unread page now and again. Eventually later I’ll hit New again for any fresh meat. Lather rinse repeat. Occasionally un-watching (resetting to [Normal]) any thread I’ve lost all interest in.
The settings I’m referring to are on your user page under Preferences >> Tracking >> Topics section. I use “Track topics I enter after [4 minutes]” and “When I post, set that topic to [Tracking]”. I also have "Consider topics new when [created in the last week]. That way if I skip a few days 'Doping for work, everything I’ve missed will be neatly collected under the [New] button.
If I post to a thread, it defaults to tracking. That is the setting I like. If a thread becomes less interesting, I change it to Normal. Then I only get notifications of replies to my post(s).
I think if I read a thread several different times the system also changes that thread to tracking for me. I’m not sure of the rules that Discourse follows to determine this. It looks like about 10 minutes of total time in a thread. under Tracking under preferences is Automatically track topics I enter
I also have several forums set to notify me when a new thread is started. This really helps as a mod. Café, The Game Room, Cecil’s, GD, P&E & ATMB.
We also have a mod forum that I set to Watched so I get alerts for any new posts in there.
I should mention, that Tracking panel in Preferences also allows you to set Watched, Tracked, Watching First Post and Muted for tags.
If you want to be alerted to evert new baseball-mlb tags; add that to Watching First Post under tags. A better example might be ukraine-invasion or breaking-news. In fact, I just added breaking-news & baseball to mine.
I’ve also used the Muted function for threads I find irritating, or that consume my time in a negative way. That way they don’t even show up in any automatic feed, so I don’t feel compelled to look in.
Yes, I do that every time I create a thread, just because otherwise I get spammed. I learned about this feature the first time I started a thread in Discourse and found myself bombarded.
