When someone is talking directly to you — by replying to you, quoting your post, mentioning your @username, or even linking to your post, a number will immediately appear over your profile picture docked at the top right. Select it to access your notifications.
Don’t worry about missing a reply – you’ll be emailed any notifications that arrive when you are away.
Note, you’ll also won’t be sent any email notifications by default if you are on the web site when the notification is issued.
New Topics
All topics less than two days old are considered new, and will show a new indicator.
Tracking Topics
Any topic you’ve actively participated in — by creating it, replying to it, or reading it for an extended period — will be automatically tracked on your behalf, and will show an unread post count indicator.
You can change your notification level for any topic via the notification control at the bottom, and right hand side, of each topic.
Notification level can also be set per category. To change any of these defaults, see your user preferences.
Edits
When a post is edited it may bump the topic to the top of the Latest list. You may also find that Admins groom topics to improve their formatting from time to time; especially topics that migrated from the old mailing list.
It seems that by default all of these messages are set to “Normal” mode? It also seems that in order to show an indicator that there are new posts and/or for the New/Unread links on top to actually work, posts need to be set to “Tracking” - is this correct? If so, how can I globally set those? I see no place to do that in the settings.
Furthermore, the dates appear off? For instance the “latest” post (I assume because it’s ate the top of the list and above the line that says “last visit” is “Cfloop inside of cfquery” yet the dates in there are from Jan 18?
Unread; any post you haven’t seen that is on a topic you are tracking.
By default, all categories track topics in “normal” mode; that is, the forum will automatically set a topic to “Tracking” for you if:
you created the topic
replied to the topic
read the topic for an extended period
You can override tracking for each individual topic; button/widget available to the right and at foot of topic. You can also override the default behaviour of tracking for every category as needed through your preferences.
This is a side effect of editing an OP in a topic; it gets bumped to recently updated even if the edit is not immediately apparent. This will happen from time to time for migrated topics as we clean up formatting, or as a consequence of folks wanting multiple profiles merged.
Note, you turn on “mailing list mode” all posts will be sent to you regardless of tracking according to your settings:
Thanks, I had found that info before posting. I was more interested in how to set something globally so that I can easily view all Unread posts. Unless I am missing something, there doesn’t seem to be a way to do this?
It seems you can only visually identify a topic as having unread posts if you are already “tracking” that topic. I see no way to default globally to tracking posts?
So the alternative is to go into every post and manually set it to “tracking”? But if it’s a New post - and more than 48 hours old, then there’s no way to identify that as having unread posts?
NEW posts are all listed. Unread posts are tracked within topics you have flagged deliberately or through activity as tracked or watched. Behaviour varies depending on how you set up your profile to define the notion of New and when tracking should be triggered.
You can modify your preferences to make sure you never miss a notification in the web interface as follows:
set New topics to stay new until you view them
automatically set track topics the moment you view a topic
For example, your preferences might look like:
In practice, I find the defaults work really well. The forum only notifies you of things you have naturally expressed an interest in by virtue of your actions. In addition, the periodic, forum “summary email” is personalised to your specific profile and can be used to catch up on topics you may have missed. Importantly, it’s not a generic digest and its personalisation rules are genuinely useful.
