How to setup notifications for/watch a forum, a new thread, a tag and more

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There are a whole load of alerts that can be setup or configured on CookingBites.

You may want to know whenever there is a new thread in a certain forum or you just may want to follow a thread, know where there are updates to it without actually participating in the thread (yet). Both of these, and more, are possible.

Setting up an alert to watch for new threads or replies within an entire forum.

To do this, simply navigate to the forum category you want to watch and click the "watch thread" on the top right hand side.

As you can see in the screenshot below, there are a variety of options to choose from.

I'll try to explain them here.
Send notifications for:

• New Threads - quite simply you will get a notification every time someone starts a new thread in this forum.
• New Messages - you will get a notification every time someone creates a new thread or replies/posts to a thread in this forum. You could get an awful lot of notifications with this option.
• Don't send notifications - you won't get a notification for anything, but the forum will be listed in the Watch Forums tab across the top of the screen.

Next you get to select what type of notification you will receive:

• Alerts
• Emails

These are what they say they are and it is possible to receive both or neither. Deselecting both is the equivalent of Don't send notifications.

Now just click on "Watch Forum" and you are done.

 

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Watching a particular thread

It is possible to set-up an alert to watch a thread that you have not (yet) participated in should it take your interest. Whilst you are viewing such a thread, in the top right hand corner, there is a "Watch Thread" button which allow you to set-up an alert to all new replies/responses within that thread.

This will then prompt you to choose if you want

• and receive email alerts (in addition to an alert)
• without receiving email notifications no emails (so just the standard alert in the top right hand corner)

Just select the option you want and click "Watch Thread".

 

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Setting up an alert to watch a particular tag
For more information on tags please see here Everything you need to know about "Tags".

If you wanted to be alerted to someone using a particular tag, such as the "cookingbites recipes challenge", then the easiest way to do this is to find a thread with that tag, click on the tag at the top, and click "Watch Tag".

So if you go and view "The CookingBites Recipe Challenge" thread,
View attachment 3187

then click on the "cookingbites recipe challenge" tag at the top, you will see the list of threads with that tag.
View attachment 3186

Now just click on the "watch tag" option in the top right hand corner.
View attachment 3188

You will receive the normal alerts prompt.
View attachment 3190

 

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Viewing your watched lists

There are 2 main type of watched lists, watched forums and watched threads.

Watched Forums
I will start with the forum view. Clicking on the Watched Forums link across the top of the screen

will get you to this page.

This tells me that I am only watching the General Cooking Discussions forum and that I have it set to alert me (though I don't know if it is with emails or not) whenever a new thread is created. I'll add in another forum to help show some other features.

If I were to select the forum(s) I want to change my settings for, by ticking the tick box(es) alongside it/them and then click on the drop down arrow to the right of the words "With Selected...", I could change the following settings.

So ticking the tick box alongside Vegetarian and Vegan, and clicking on the drop down menu gives me the following screen:

The options are pretty obvious really.

• Enable email notification
• Disable email notification
• Enable alerts
• Disable alerts
• Stop watching forums

Select the option you want, and click Go and you have changed the options.

If you want to remove a forum from this list, select "Stop watching forums" and click "Go".

A couple of points to notice are that

• the notification settings for the Vegetarian and Vegan forum are set to only show up in this list without any notifications (so no alerts or emails) hence nothing showing in the circled area.
• there are no unread messages in the Vegetarian and Vegan forum
• Finally, there is one main difference between the Watched Forums view and the Watched Threads view and it is shown in the above image. In the Watched Forums view a forum will be displayed even if there are no unread messages/threads in there. In the Watched Threads view only threads with unread replies/posts in them and only the most recent 25 are displayed.

 

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Watched Threads

The Watched Threads list works slightly differently to the Watched Forums list. It will not show a thread that doesn't have any new updates. It also won't give you any options to change any setting for those Watched Threads. Finally it only shows you the latest 25 updates Watched Threads. But otherwise, it is a list of updated threads so it is quite a handy place to keep track of things just in case you missed any alerts.

So a few points to note.

You may have 5 alerts and 6 threads in the list. There may be 20 or more unread posts/replies between those 6 threads.
All it means is that when you last looked at the Watched Threads list or your alerts list, you didn't then go and click on any of them and read your unread posts.

Obviously following any of the links (clicking on the thread titles) will take you into the thread to the first of the unread posts for that thread. If you don't go to the end of the thread, so the very final page, the thread will stay marked as unread, because there are still unread posts/replies in that thread. You will just get taken to the next page next time you click on that thread.

Another point to note is that unlike the Watched Forums list, you can't change the settings for each thread here. To do that, say you want to stop watching a thread, you will need to go into the thread and change the settings there.

Unwatching a Thread

Go into the thread, and scroll to the top of the screen. At the top of the screen you will see, on the right hand side, the words "Unwatch Thread".

Clicking on the Unwatch Thread option will bring up a confirmation box where you need to click on Unwatch Thread again.

You may briefly see a confirmation message across the top of the page, but it only stays for a few moment, so don't worry if you don't see it.

So even though you may (or may not) have previously replied to this thread, you have now opted out of any further notifications of updates to it.

 

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It is probably worth briefly mentioning both your account preferences and your account alert preferences here.

These are the default settings for your account. The default notification options (alerts and/or emails) for various options and also what you actually get alerted about.

So if I click on my member name in the top right hand corner of the screen, I will get a small drop down menu listing various account options. These are specific to my account.

I'll only briefly cover them here because there will be a proper help thread about all account settings in the near future. But for now...

(Account) Preferences

Clicking on the Preferences option will give you the following screen (Yours may look slightly different to mine, so I have included another version of it. They do the same thing and have exactly the same options.)

The highlighted options all relate to watched threads and watched media/albums or categories you add to media. They are the default options. So if you reply to a thread, this is what is going to happen. Right now, I will get an alert but no email for that thread/media/album.

Alert Preferences
Moving on to Alert Preferences, these are what you get notified about. How you get notified is under Preferences.
There are a whole load of settings in here, ranging from what happens when someone replies to a thread you are watching to someone uploading a file to a watched thread, to someone liking your message. The settings relate to Messages on Threads, Messages on your Profile Page, Media, Achievements and Featured Threads.