The Discourse team has introduced a new feature allowing users to Watch chat threads, enabling notifications for all replies and displaying unread counts in thread lists. To activate, users click the bell icon in the thread header and select ‘Watching’ lindsey. Currently, threads are not automatically set to ‘Watching’ when initiated by the user or when they reply — instead, they default to ‘Tracking’ to avoid overwhelming users with aggressive notifications lindsey. Falco questioned this behavior, suggesting that threads started by the user (OP) should default to ‘Watching’ for consistency with topic behavior in Discourse. lindsey acknowledged the point and agreed consistency would be ideal, but noted concerns about chat’s higher reply volume and speed. The team is open to feedback and potential future changes based on user input.
We’ve made a recent improvement to allow users to Watch chat threads. This lets you keep a close eye on threaded conversations that are important to you.
To Watch a thread, click or tap the bell icon in the thread header area and select Watching:
Like with topics, when you Watch a thread, you’ll get notifications for all replies and will see a count of new replies in your thread lists.
Do we auto watch when the thread is started from a message we sent? What about auto watching for participants?
At the moment, no — threads are set to Tracking (not Watching) when they are started from a chat you’ve sent (i.e. the thread OP) and when you reply to a thread.
We debated this when building Watching, but weren’t sure if folks would want that or not since the Watching notifications are more aggressive. However, we’d love to hear feedback from anyone who would find that helpful so we can consider it for a future improvement!
So no push notifications for activity in a thread I was the OP or that I participated?
At least for threads I’m the OP, defaulting to “Watch” would be consistent with the behavior of Discourse when you author a topic.
That’s fair, and I agree that consistency here would be nice. My main concern was that chat lends itself to higher reply volumes and speeds, and wanting to be mindful not to overwhelm folks with push notifications. You could of course move from Watching → Tracking in that case.
Again, open to changing this but wanted to get more input first. So I’m glad to have yours!
