And if my setting for newness is “I haven’t viewed them yet”?
Then tracking has no effect on “new” as everything that you haven’t seen is considered “new”. All tracking will with “I haven’t viewed them yet” is determine whether or not to show unread count - which is of course affected by “Automatically track topics I enter”.
Okay, so tracking/watching overwrites the user preferences if in favour of display the indicator but not against it. Makes sense.
I guess another way of putting this is to say that the newness definition under preferences only applies to categories in their “normal” state, i.e. if they are neither tracked nor watched.
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Note: the copy on mobile is now more consistent with the rest of the app and reads:
You will see a count of new replies because you are tracking this topic.
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Yeah, I quietly submitted a PR a few months ago to fix that, didn’t post here to avoid more bikeshedding:
https://github.com/discourse/discourse/pull/4820
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I’ve read the description of “Watching first post” several times, as well as reading through this thread, and I’m still confused about something.
I’d like my users of one category to get notifications of new topics in that category, but not of all the reply posts on those topics (unless they post and get replied to, or they are mentioned, etc.).
The description of “watching first post” seems to imply that I can get notifications of the first response to every topic in a category, but there is no option to get notified of new topics in a category without “watching” the category and thus getting notified of every new topic and every single post under those topics. Am I misunderstanding?
No. The first post is the first post. It’s not the first reply.
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Ah. Thanks. So, why doesn’t it just say “get notified of new topics” or something, instead of talking about the “first post in each new topic” as though that’s a separate thing from the new topic?
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Sure, if you think that copy is clearer, we can change it. Feel free to make specific proposals in a new reply to this topic. 
Wait a second: it already says new topic in there:
the first post in each new topic
So basically you’re unclear what “first post” means, you want to mentally ram “reply” in there somehow? Why? Yeah I’m just gonna close this topic and save us both some grief.
You’re welcome.
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