Registered users have the ability to ‘watch/follow’ another user and be notified when they create a new topic. A new tab is added to the user’s profile that displays the users they are watching. (You can dump the data I will template and style it.) A field get’s loaded on the user profile that shows how many people are watching/following them. You can choose to watch/follow a user from the topic view or the user’s profile.
ASAP
Please give me a quote, I know this is a bit of work.
Hey Melissa, welcome to the community!
I’m interested, but could you flesh out the spec a bit more? For example in Discourse there are four different levels of watching / following for a category, which have different ramifications for in-app notifications, emails and push notifications.
This feature has been discussed for some time here: https://meta.discourse.org/t/ability-to-follow-and-friend-other-users/1584, and has a pr-welcome tag, which makes working on it an interesting prospect.
Perhaps you could get a few people together to support the development of something that could be merged into core Discourse?
@P16 you mentioned you were thinking of hiring someone to build this. Still interested?
Hi @angus, thank you!
For our case, we’re ok to keep it as simple as possible.
Comparing to the topic watch/follow options, what we’re looking for would be most similar to the ‘Watch’ option, but you would only be notified when that artist is the OP of a new topic. I would disable any notifications of likes/replies/etc. entirely, so in a one-size-fits-some plugin scenario I would need options in the admin to do so. An unfollow/unwatch of the person would default back to something like the ‘normal’ option for topics, you wouldn’t get notifications anymore.
As for the users I am watching, I’d like to have a tab in the user profile that shows them similarly to the way the user directory page works. Later I may turn this into a ‘feed’ of topics by the users I am watching.
It would also be nice to have the admin option of showing a count of how many watchers a user has on their profile. (I admit I’m not sold on the value of this, but I can see it being requested.)
I envision the watch/unwatch as a button existing with the ‘message’ button on the user profile, and maybe a smallish icon on the user avatar within the topic view. For my case, the big thing is the notifications.
Imagine I’m participating in a film industry forum. Yes, a lot of it is general discussion and demo reels, but if James Cameron posts a new project I want to know about it. This is what I’m dealing with, more so than a social situation between users.
Please let me know what additional details I can provide. 
Hi @angus, that would be great - @wishspinner Would you be interested in collaborating?
@wishspinner @P16 I’ve messaged you both concerning this
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