The big advantage of discourse (the software that this forum uses) is that you can specify exactly which emails you want to receive and which ones you don’t care about. I will explain some of these settings here.
To start with, consider the following three basic reasons why you might receive an email from this forum:
- Another user sent a message directly to you or replied to a message you wrote.
- When you have not visited the forum for a specified period of time, the forum will automatically send you a summary of what has been discussed on the forum since your last visit.
- Someone created a new post in a category that you have “subscribed” (the official term is “watching”, but subscribing seems easier to understand)
To keep this post as short as possible, I will assume that you do not want to change anything about number 1 (but feel free to ask if you do). So let’s take a quick look at how you can change numbers 2 and 3.
###Summary emails###
Go to your user preferences
- Click on the circle in the top right corner of your screen (it either shows a letter or your custom picture)
- Then select the
icon. - Go to the Emails tab:
- Find the Activity Summary setting and change it as you like it (or deactivate it entirely by unchecking the box:
- Don’t forget to Save Changes!
###Category subscriptions###
As you will have noticed, all posts on the forum belong to a category. If the forum as a whole is a big conference centre, the categories are the different rooms in that centre. To follow what is going on in a specific room while you are not visiting the forum website, you can watch (or subscribe) this category. Let’s say you want to receive an email whenever someone writes something in the #tools category. You have two options:
a. You can receive an email whenever someone starts a new topic in the tools category (that would be called “Watching First Post”) or
b. you can receive an email whenever anyone says something in the tools category (that would be called “Watching”)
You can see which topics you are currently Watching or Watching First Post by following steps 1 and 2 above and then
3. go to the Categories tab
4. Here you can add or remove categories from which you want to receive an email for each new topic that is created (but you will not receive an email if someone replies to that first post):
Note: please: do not un-watch “News & Updates”.
5. And here you can add or remove categories from which you want to receive an email for every post someone creates:
There are many other ways how you can change these email settings but I promised to keep this short. So if you have any further questions regarding this, just reply an ask.