Discourse Follow

[Discourse]

IMPORTANT WARNING: This plugin may affect whether laws that regulate social media apply to your forum. Consult legal for advice.

	Summary	Discourse Follow allows users to follow other users, list the latest topics involving them, and receive notifications when they post.
	Repository Link	https://github.com/discourse/discourse-follow
	Install Guide	How to install plugins in Discourse

As this is an official plugin maintained by the Discourse team, support, bug, ux, and feature requests can be made in the respective categories here on Meta, and tagged with the appropriate plugin tag. Click on a link below to get one started.

 Support  Bug  UX  Feature

Screenshots

Followed users posts feed:

List of users you’re following:

Follow button on the user card and profile page:

User preferences:

Admin site settings:

Configuration

User preferences

Preference	Purpose
Notify me when followed	Enables/disables notification when someone follows you
Notify followed user when followed	Enables/disables notifications that other people receive when you follow them
Notify me when followed replies	Enables/disables notifications when people you’re following reply
Notify me when followed creates topic	Enables/disables notifications when people you’re following create new topics
Allow people to follow me	Allow/don’t allow anyone to follow you. If you turn this preference off and you have existing followers, they’ll no longer receive notifications about your new replies/topics, you will not appear in their following users list, and your posts will not appear in their follow feed.

Changing defaults of user preferences

Each user preference that the plugin adds has a site setting counterpart that controls the default value of the preference for future users and users who have never changed any of the preferences added by the plugin.

For example, the default notify me when followed creates topic site setting controls the default value of the Notify me when someone I follow creates a topic preference. If you change that site setting, then all new signups will have that preference set to the same value as the site setting. Existing users who never changed any preferences added by the plugin will also be affected by the site setting change.

Site settings

Setting	Default	Purpose
discourse follow enabled	True	Enables/disables the plugin
follow show statistics on profile	True	Controls whether the “Followers” and “Following” counts are shown on the user card and profile (see screenshots above)
follow notifications enabled	True	Enables/disables all kinds of notifications added by the plugin (when disabled it overrides user preferences)
follow followers visible	Everyone	Controls who can see the followers list under user profile and the Followers count
follow following visible	Everyone	Controls who can see the following users list under user profile and the Following count
default notify me when followed	True	(see the sections related to user preferences above)
default notify followed user when followed	True	(see the sections related to user preferences above)
default notify me when followed replies	False	(see the sections related to user preferences above)
default notify me when followed creates topic	False	(see the sections related to user preferences above)
default allow people to follow me	True	(see the sections related to user preferences above)

Credits

This plugin was developed by the Pavilion team and maintained by them until October 2021 when it was promoted to an official plugin. The Discourse team (CDCK, Inc) is currently maintaining this plugin.

Hosted by us? This plugin is available on our Enterprise plans

Last edited by @JammyDodger 2024-06-18T15:17:12Z

Check document

Perform check on document:

[wenqin]

“ Install Guide How to install plugins in Discourse”
The installation method linked here is the “Discourse Solved Plugin”.
Where are the installation instructions specific to the follow plugin?

[Lilly]

Those instructions are for all plugins, it’s just using the Discourse-Solved one as an example.

[STORMS]

Can you make it to where each person’s followers are also visible on the user’s postbit? So every time they post, you can see their followers?

[nwnuyhs (Yang Hongsheng)]

Very useful ,thank you

[Rohail_Altaf]

Should the notify when someone I follow creates a post also supposed to send emails or just an in-app notification?

[Don]

@Rohail_Altaf

an in-app notification

yes and push notification.