I mean, it’s not hard to reproduce my initial report here on meta itself. Here I have the Support category set as tracking — and have had it set like this since my initial report when I reproduced what was happening on our hosted instance.
No new topics are actually tracked until I open them. For example, the most recent post right now is:
When I open it, I can see it’s set to normal:
But upon refreshing the page I see it’s actually tracked (I refreshed immediately so as to not trigger the time-based watching):
This seems pretty clear-cut, no?
Topics only tracked if I open them (or have opened them). This isn’t how watching a category works.