Reply to Individual After Accidentally Just Replying to Thread

[noisneil]

I've found that if someone replies to a suggestion I made by hitting the reply button at the bottom of a thread, I won't get a notification. I will get one if they hit the reply button next to my comment, however. Maybe I've misunderstood how this works, but I often find myself manually trawling through my activity list to see if people still need help.

I sometimes forget too, and wonder if I'm not getting a reply to the suggestion I spent an hour on because people aren't getting notifications. The only thing I've thought to do is to edit my comment and @ them.

So I have two questions:

1. Am I talking out of my arse?
2. Is there a way to change a general reply to a personal one after the fact?

[evanfuchs]

@noisneil

I often find myself manually trawling through my activity list to see if people still need help.

I'm pretty sure the default notifications preference when you post in a topic is "Tracking" which will notify you if you are mentioned or if someone replies to your post in a topic. You can change this default in User_Preferences_Notifications (or per topic, using the dropdown on the topics page shown after the last post) to "Watching" which will notify you of every post in the topic.

@noisneil

wonder if I'm not getting a reply to the suggestion I spent an hour on because people aren't getting notifications

As it stands, the user would have to know or be prompted to make their own change on this.

[noisneil]

I already have it set to tracking when I post, but I often don't get notified. Ah well, no biggie really. Thanks for the reply though!

[evanfuchs]

You can change the topic from Tracking to Watching, and I think you'll get notified on replies to the topic in addition to replies to your post within the topic

You can also change the default for all topics:

[noisneil]

@evanfuchs

You can also change the default for all topics:

As I said, this is already set but I often see topics in "Latest" that I'd previously contributed to but wasn't notified about.

[evanfuchs]

Oh I thought you said you had it set to Tracking, not Watching. I got nothing else.

[noisneil]

Ah, but you underestimate my stupidity...

Of course I'd misread your previous post and of course I had it set to "tracking".

Changed now. Thanks for taking the time to help me out!

[Frankb]

@noisneil

Ah, but you underestimate my stupidity...

Self-irony is one of the best qualities a person can have.

[ccstone]

Hey Guys,

This one really messed with me too. I thought that "Tracking" was the highest level of observation and was constantly wondering why I was missing notifications.

I finally fixed that a couple of years ago, and I also changed the way I use the forum.

• I nearly always use the keyboard to navigate through topics and reply.
  • j == move down one post.
  • k == move up one post.
  • r == reply to the selected post.
  • R == reply to the Topic.
  • q == quote the selected post (or selected text).

Use ⌘? in the forum to show the help overlay.

Here's what a selected post in a topic looks like:

Note too that when replying to an individual the editor will show their avatar image at the upper left – unless you reply to the owner of the topic (Original Poster); in that case there will be no avatar (which is bad UI in my opinion).

Using this technique consistently has helped me make fewer mistakes and therefore made my Discourse Life a bit smoother.

-Chris