How to follow a user and get notifications for this specific user?

support
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I searched but couldn’t find an answer to this specifically…

Is there a way to get a notification (email, desktop) for a specific user? I know you can suppress specific users…

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Sorry, I don’t understand what you mean? You want a notification every time a particular user posts? You’ll need to subscribe to the RSS feed on that user’s profile page then.

To subscribe to a user’s RSS feed, you will need a RSS reader.

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Ah, I see. But that’s not as quick (and as native) as getting a desktop notification whenever a specific user posts or responds.

I did see this:

https://meta.discourse.org/users/codinghorror/activity.rss

:+1:

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Discourse isn’t a social media engine, but a discussion tool, so the “follow a person” feature never really made sense to us.

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And I agree with this perspective entirely… but there is a use-case, I believe, where there’s someone specific or a leader / moderator that you realize you trust a lot and you don’t want to miss anything they have to offer. I see this behavior in my own new forum where folks really want to follow a very specific person of interest.

Thanks!

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Then visit that person’s profile page… which contains all their posts.

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That’s what I’m recommending to the users who have asked! Perfecto.

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How feasible would it be to “bookmark a user”? Basically a way to keep a list of the people I want to keep track of.

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The easiest way I can think of is to create a message to yourself with posts containing links to their Profiles.

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Revisiting this old issue… I think this feature would make sense as an administrative tool, not as a site-wide feature.

Some possible (non-social) use cases

All of these are based on actual experiences I had.

The unconfirmed spammer:

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image965×344 17.6 KB

So I’ve seen this kind of spammer before, they do this one post, then a few days later come back and do a post with some SEO link. BUT I can’t be 100% sure this isn’t a legitimate user. So I would like to subscribe to his posts so I would be immediately notified when he posts again.

The trainee:

I have a new moderator I am training and I want to ask to see all his posts to help him out as he goes along.

The person I’ve just warned:

So, suppose I have to give one of my dear community members a harsh warning. Then I’m nervous and fidgeting, will he repeat his behavior? Will he lash out with a really nasty post? I need to stay on top of that…

Some possible details about the feature

These are just ideas, I’m not even sure if they’re good ones…

  • this could be an auto-subscribe feature: I’m an admin, I warn someone, then Discourse automatically notifies me “A person who was recently warned has posted”

  • this could be an auto-expire feature: I can subscribe to user’s posts for a week, or a month, but not indefinitely.

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What about the Follow Plugin 👨? Looks like there are plans for a “stealth mode” that would solve the administrative need.

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Definitely looks interesting, thanks. The yet-to-be-implemented Stealth mode would be a must, I won’t have much use for the plugin without it.

I guess I would really prefer a way to have this exclusively for admins, to keep turning my site into this “social” style like @codinghorror mentioned above…

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Is there a way for users to discover the RSS feeds? Even just an auto-discovery link would be enough for people to find it with simple instructions: “go to a user profile page (any section) and paste the URL into your RSS reader”, maybe something like this:

<link
    rel="alternate"
    type="application/rss+xml"
    title="{username} on {siteName}"
    href="/users/{username}/activity.rss"
/>
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…what RSS feed? I notice no information relevant via any profile.

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