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)

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). [image] You can make the read/unread state more clear with custom css if you want.

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).

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?

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 :slight_smile: (Unread only show you topics that you’re tracking/watching.)

You may also want to set this setting: [image] It prevents the “new” indicator from expiring until you actually read the topic. Together with… [image] …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.

Is it possible to watch or track ALL categories in a forum?

Product Support

Tom_Newsom (Tom Newsom) August 22, 2016, 1:36pm 4

Latest does that for you surely? It’s a list of all topics, sorted by last modification.

Topic		Replies	Views
I want to read every post and every topic on my Discourse Product Support	7	1247	December 14, 2016
Unread topics in query-link-lists tracking/watching Feature	6	3458	November 26, 2020
Option to track all new posts UX	4	1661	November 20, 2015
Global tracking selection Feature	5	1060	February 26, 2019
Make new watched/tracked topics also unread Feature	13	2632	February 28, 2019

Is it possible to watch or track ALL categories in a forum?

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