Why am I "watching" all forum categories upon registration?

_PIB

I have lots of unread topics just because I am "watching" every single category - I did not vote for this. How do I fix it?

kshegunov

@_PIB said in Why am I "watching" all forum categories upon registration?:

I did not vote for this

No one did, it's just how the bulletin board works.

How do I fix it?

You don't. To my knowledge the unread button will list all topics that you haven't read. It has nothing to do with "watching" a specific topic, which causes you to get a notification when someone posts something in that topic.

_PIB

I am not watching any topics because I registered yesterday. I am watching all CATEGORIES. There is a big button in every category which lets me to "Watch" or to "Ignore" the category and even though I never clicked "Watch" in every category of the forum, I do.

It prevents me from watching the specific topics which I am interested in because of how much useless information I have there in "unread" list.

kshegunov

Yes, you're right, I haven't even noticed that particular button. Well, @tekojo might be able to answer this, but I assume it's the default setting for NodeBB.

_PIB

I am still interested in fixing this.

tekojo

Hi,
It indeed is the default for NodeBB, and there is no way to change that for existing users.

There is a plugin that turns it to opt-in for new users. We could turn that on, but it doesn't help existing users at all.

My guess is that having the default as watch categories makes a forum look more active. In our case it doesn't help much, as there are 99+ posts every day.

_PIB

@tekojo of course it would be nice to fix it for all users but if it is not easy it is not a reason for not fixing it for new users. Basically this feature prevents users from watching categories.

I am fine with clicking through all categories for once if new users are liberated from this.

tekojo

@_PIB
Asking for this to be included as soon as someone from IT has a coffee break.

_PIB

Found it: https://github.com/NodeBB/nodebb-plugin-category-optin but I guess IT guys know this themselves.

tekojo

Thanks,
They had that already looked up.

Our IT is pretty good with node and nodebb. Although I have to say this is really low maintenance. If we didn't have a custom theme, no one would probably touch the maintenance side at all.

J.Hilk

Hi @tekojo,
did you guys make some changes recently, I would assume in correlation with this topic?

At least I have just noticed that I do not automatically watch my own created threads anymore.

tekojo

Hi @J-Hilk
The own thread watching was simple to remove.
The default thread view changing is harder, I'll remind our IT people about it as we are looking at a version upgrade.

_PIB

@J.Hilk that's probably a bug, you can always modify that behaviour on your settings page.

Watch topics you create
Watch topics that you reply to