A quick look at how Discourse handles notifications, bookmarks, and following — all of which are more flexible than what you were used to on our previous platform. For more on following and the /filter page, see the full guide Finding Answers — Search, Navigation & Filtering.
You have four levels of notification for any topic, category, or tag:
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Watching — notified of every new post
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Tracking — notified of replies to your posts and direct mentions
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Normal — notified only if mentioned
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Muted — never notified; hidden from your feed
Set these at whatever granularity makes sense for you. Watch the categories you’re most active in, mute anything you don’t need, and let the rest stay at Normal. Go to Profile → Preferences → Tracking to set your categories and tags all in one place.
Email works the way you want. Under Profile → Preferences → Emails, choose whether you get emails always, only when you’re away (the default), or never — so the forum doesn’t flood your inbox while you’re actively using it.
Follow a topic without posting in it. Open any topic and use the notification control at the bottom to set it to Watching. You’ll get notified of every reply without needing to have contributed anything to the thread.
The /filter page lets you build your own views. Go to /filter to construct custom topic lists using a simple query language — for example, all open questions in a category with fewer than three replies, or every topic you’ve bookmarked in a specific category. You can save useful filters to your sidebar as permanent links.
If you want to learn more, visit our Staying Up to Date — Notifications & Bookmarks guide.