In preferences, under “Watched” or “Tracked” you can select which categories. What if you want to watch or track ALL categories in a forum, is this possible? (entering the name of each category individually is presumably the workaround if not)
AI-generated summary
In a forum support discussion titled ‘Is it possible to watch or track ALL categories in a forum?’, AnneCarpenter asks if there’s a way to track all categories without manually selecting each one, preferring in-browser notifications (blue dots) over email. alehandrof suggests mailing list mode, but AnneCarpenter clarifies she wants browser-based visibility only. Tom_Newsom recommends using the ‘Latest’ view, which lists all topics by last modification. AnneCarpenter questions whether new replies to old topics are visibly marked. Tom_Newsom explains the visual indicators: gray for fully read topics, black for unread posts, and ‘NEW’ for entirely unread topics (which fades quickly). He also notes custom CSS can enhance readability. AnneCarpenter confirms this meets her needs, noting she can scan black titles to find unread content, though she observes there’s no filter to sort topics strictly by unread status — ‘Unread’ only shows topics she’s explicitly watching. Tom_Newsom confirms this. fefrei adds a helpful tip: enabling settings to prevent the ‘new’ indicator from expiring until a topic is fully read, ensuring persistent visual cues (blue numbers or ‘new’ badges) for unread content. This combination allows AnneCarpenter to effectively monitor all forum activity via browser without email.
You can enable mailing list mode from your user preferences, which is effectively the same thing as watching all categories.
(I tried to upload a screenshot but it seems there’s an issue?)
I see the option you mean - but it seems mailing list mode also requires that the watching/tracking happens by email notifications. I was hoping to watch or track all categories, and rely on the blue dot or notifications that occur within the browser window - I’m not super-familiar with the terminology so hopefully I explained that right. In short, I’d like to be sure I ‘see’ everything that happens on my forum, using my mobile device or desktop computer’s web browser (and not use email at all).
Latest does that for you surely? It’s a list of all topics, sorted by last modification.
Maybe! But I don’t know how the markings work… will every new topic and new response to a topic be marked in some visible way? In the forum I’m looking at, it appears that new topics definitely have a blue circle and the word NEW, so that’s good. But not sure about new replies to old posts, will those be marked distinctively?
If you’ve read everything, the topic title is grey. If you have unread posts, the topic title is black. If it says “new” then you haven’t read anything in that topic at all (this badge falls off after a short while, leaving the topic black like other unread topics).
You can make the read/unread state more clear with custom css if you want.
Oh my goodness, I never noticed the gray/black! Thanks for educating me on this.
I guess there is no way to sort/filter the list of topics by that unread criterion, am I right?
- Latest - is in order it was posted, whether read or not (though at least ‘new’ topics are marked)
- Unread - is only for entirely unread topics, apparently. If there is a new response to an old topic it doesn’t appear here.
I think that Latest’s current behavior is sufficient for my aims, though, because if I’m reasonably caught up on reading I can skim the front page or two for any black headings; I don’t need it to be precisely ordered by “read/unread” status. So I think this will work! Again, many thanks!
no problem 
(Unread only show you topics that you’re tracking/watching.)
You may also want to set this setting:
It prevents the “new” indicator from expiring until you actually read the topic. Together with…
…it ensures that all topics that were created after you did this will always have either a “new” or a blue number next to them until you read all posts in them.