Users discuss how to receive notifications for new Discourse releases, with zjpcyo reporting an issue where they only recently received their first notification despite having subscribed to the release-notes tag at the “Watching First Post” level months ago. Others confirm they’ve had no issues with similar settings on other tags like Marketplace. JammyDodger and Moin clarify that release-notes is a tag, not a category, and confirm zjpcyo has it correctly set. jimkleiber suggests using regular “Watching” or “Tracking” as a workaround, since release topics rarely have many replies. zjpcyo explains they prefer “Watching First Post” to receive only announcement emails, not replies. They also share a tip: using ?order=created in the URL to sort topics by creation date, useful for avoiding comment-driven topic reordering — demonstrated with a screenshot from Manjaro’s Discourse. Stephen notes they receive release emails while set to “Watching,” and adds that replies to release notes are typically minimal, so email overload isn’t an issue. zjpcyo concludes that the solution may lie in a linked split topic.
To later visitors looking for help: You can be notified of new releases by subscribing to the RSS feed:
I’ve come to Support to give a heads-up that I subscribed to release-notes at the Watching First Post notification level months ago. But I only got my first notification from Discourse today. I’ve missed many notifications I should have received.
Weird.
I watched (set to tracking) Marketplace for a few months and didn’t miss any topic.
I assumed this issue would be uncommon and difficult to reproduce. I just wanted to make some record and offer a solution. I’m not sure if there are similar Support requests or Contribute > Bug 's.
Also, I want to point out that I am specifically using “Watching First Post”. Perhaps Tracking works and Watching First Post does not.
As a temporary workaround, I see that release-notes topics rarely have more than 1-2 posts, so maybe the regular watch or tracking option would work for you on that for now.
Looking at your preferences @zjpcyo, it seems you don’t have any categories set to Watching First Post?
@moin has correctly pointed out that release-notes is a tag and not a category, and I can see that is in your Tag Notifications as Watching First Post. 
I’m still not sure why you wouldn’t receive any notifications for it though? I shall investigate further. 
That is because release-notes is a tag and not a category
I’d like to be notified by e-mail. So I believe that excludes Tracking.
I just want the announcements not the comments. That is why I chose Watching First Post instead of Watching.
As a sidenote, the ?order=created parameter solves the problem of recent comments knocking the topics out of order.
So if I want to peek at a topic list without subscribing, I can use that parameter in the address bar to sort topics by created date.
Ex.
https://meta.discourse.org/?order=created
As a practical matter, release-notes don’t appear to have that issue. But this can be useful in other cases.
Ex. Manjaro releases category:
References
I receive emails for releases but I’m set to ‘watching’ rather than ‘watch first’.
The only responses to release-notes topics are additional notes, so you won’t be bombarded with reply notification emails.
It looks like the solution is in the split topic. 
