I think you are right. Right now “tracking” is used as the name for a notification level within the dropdown and as a term for the feature to choose a notification level. That’s why it’s shown on hover, used as a heading in the guide and as the name of the section in your preferences where you configure the notification level. I think it’s good to use a consistent name for the feature in all those places but I am not sure if “Notification level” next to “Notifications” will cause more or less confusion.
Could renaming the notification level “Tracking” help solve the issue, e.g. to “Following” or “Observing”? Though the latter is semantically quite close to “Watching”.
Maybe. I didn’t suggest anything because I was worried about how well using a different term would work in other languages. Translators would have to find enough different terms in their language, too. And for that, you need the context of how these different terms are connected to each other.
For example, the German translation of ‘watching’ is ‘beobachten’. For ‘tracking’ we use ‘verfolgen’, which is already like “following.” The translation of ‘observing’ would likely result in one of these words, too.
I also expect a lot of guides on how to use a Discourse forum to refer to the current terms used for the tracking levels.
I think renaming the feature as it was suggested in the first post could work better. I like the idea of removing the term ‘tracking’ as awesomerobot suggested, but I am not sure about “notification level” next to “notifications” in the user preferences.
