# Request: Finer selection controls on automatic tracking
**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/request-finer-selection-controls-on-automatic-tracking/67912
**Category:** Feature
**Created:** [2017年八月11日 22:08 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/request-finer-selection-controls-on-automatic-tracking/67912 "2017-08-11T22:08:51Z")
**Posts on this page:** 6
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@elijah](https://meta.discourse.org/u/elijah)
#### Post date: [2017年八月11日 22:08 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/request-finer-selection-controls-on-automatic-tracking/67912/1 "2017-08-11T22:08:51Z")
I read almost all new topics here, but I don’t want to track them all. So I set “automatically track topics” to “never”. I have retained the default for “when I post in a topic, set that topic to” “tracking”.
I’d like to see other ways to automatically track topic. I understand that you are all busy now, so it is not going to happen soon.
Two conditions that I could see myself using are:
- Automatically track topics when I “like” posts in them.
- Automatically track topics when I bookmark something in them.
Others I can see possibly being useful:
- Automatically track topics when I flag posts in them.
- Automatically track topics when handling a flag in them.
- Automatically track topics when I create a linked post.
Obviously this gets to be quite a lot of cases, and would probably need a new UI design to handle that many things.
A couple of questions for the community here:
1. Is this something other people would like, or is it just me?
2. Are there other cases people would like to see tracked automatically?
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### Author:  [@tophee](https://meta.discourse.org/u/tophee)
#### Post date: [2017年八月12日 00:51 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/request-finer-selection-controls-on-automatic-tracking/67912/2 "2017-08-12T00:51:01Z")
> [@elijah](#):
>
> I set “automatically track topics” to “never”.
So you are saying even the maximum setting of 10 minutes for `Automatically track topics I enter` is not enough?
I agree that there is room for improvement in the autotracking feature but I’m not sure if adding piles of new options is the right way.
To start with, I think it’s important to remind ourselves that it is incredibly easy to manually set a topic to tracking, so many use cases can probably be accommodated by having a rather conservative auto-tracking setting and manually track whatever is not captured automatically.
So based on that, the question becomes: what is preventing you (or me) from finding a sufficiently conservative auto-tracking setting without effectively turning autotracking off? The answer is probably “because reading time alone is not a sufficient indicator for interest in the topic” (Although it is doing a pretty good job, I have to say! In fact, it occurs to me that it might be punishing mainly people who read a lot into a topic before deciding to drop it).
So I think what is needed is one additional criterion that will be connected with a logical AND to the time criterion. So, for example: auto track topic if I have read it for 4 minutes _and_ liked a post. Or - an option that you haven’t mentioned yet: “I have read it for 4 minutes and read all posts.”
BTW, a completely different solution might be to add an auto-untrack setting which sets the topic back to normal if you have ignored the topic with new posts for x days. Actually, I think that might solve most of my tracking issues…
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### Author:  [@elijah](https://meta.discourse.org/u/elijah)
#### Post date: [2017年八月12日 06:16 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/request-finer-selection-controls-on-automatic-tracking/67912/3 "2017-08-12T06:16:13Z")
> [@tophee](#):
>
> So based on that, the question becomes: what is preventing you (or me) from finding a sufficiently conservative auto-tracking setting without effectively turning autotracking off?
The trouble with autotracking as it is now, is that it does not prioritize my reading the way I would like it to. I use the suggested topics at the bottom of a topic as my next choice to read all the time. The suggested topics prioritize new, and then tracked topics, then semi-random. If I track everything I read, I’ll get the wrong suggested topics.
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### Author:  [@codinghorror](https://meta.discourse.org/u/codinghorror)
#### Post date: [2017年八月12日 10:53 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/request-finer-selection-controls-on-automatic-tracking/67912/4 "2017-08-12T10:53:01Z")
The order of suggested is tracked/watched, then new.
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### Author:  [@tophee](https://meta.discourse.org/u/tophee)
#### Post date: [2017年八月12日 11:43 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/request-finer-selection-controls-on-automatic-tracking/67912/5 "2017-08-12T11:43:09Z")
I think by
> [@elijah](#):
>
> wrong suggested topics
he meant “not the ones I want (because I’m tracking everything)”
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### Author:  [@elijah](https://meta.discourse.org/u/elijah)
#### Post date: [2017年八月12日 19:00 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/request-finer-selection-controls-on-automatic-tracking/67912/6 "2017-08-12T19:00:51Z")
Yes. I don’t want to track everything I read because of that problem.
Watched stuff appears as notifications, and I’ll often clear those before even starting the suggestions in Suggested Topics. I use Watching as a fix for a few very interesting topics on one big site where I am tracking nearly everything.