New KF Feature Spotlight: Follow Topics

[Patrick]

Hey all,

With the launch of the new KarateForums.com behind us, I thought it would fun to periodically shine a light on a new feature and talk about how it works. Technology-wise, our community was the same for a long time, and there are so many new things that were added in this update. Most of them will be simple, straightforward additions that hopefully make your experience a little better. Some of them might be a bit bigger than that.

Follow Topics

Today, I wanted to highlight the Follow Topics feature. I will use the words topic and thread interchangeably here. On our old software, you could opt to receive email notifications when a thread had a new reply. This new feature operates similarly, but you have more options. You can receive notifications via:

• Email, like before
• Notification list (the community-based notification system represented by the bell icon at the top of our site)
• Push notifications, if you have them enabled on your browser or mobile device

You can set these options from your Notification Settings, which are accessible via the Account Settings link, which you can find by clicking your username at the top of the site. I'll include a screenshot of that this area looks like below.

Where to Find Follow Topics

At the top of each thread, you can find a "Follow" button that will allow you to follow a thread without replying to it, which is handy if you are interested in a conversation only as a reader. It looks like this:

You might be wondering, how can threads here already have followers? That is because we wanted to respect the choice members made to previously follow topics here. So if you had previously subscribed to a thread on our old software, you should still be subscribed to the thread.

You can also find the option to follow a thread when you are creating or replying to one. Here's what that looks like:

Customizing Your Settings

If you want to automatically follow any thread you create or reply to, you can do that, as well in your Notification Settings. I made a deliberate choice to leave this off and put it in your hands, effectively making it a deliberate choice that you can make for yourself. By now, I think we are all used to communities and platforms that want to addict us and turn various notifications on my default, and we only notice them when they start flooding our inboxes or devices. That's not what I want for this community.

You can easily adjust your notifications at any time through our Notification Settings, which also includes the ability to silence all push or email notifications, each with a single click.

I hope you have found this post useful, and if you have any questions about this feature of how it works, please feel free to ask them here. If you see a question you can answer, please feel free to do so!

Thanks for reading.

Patrick

[sensei8]

Now, that's a very cool feature. Thanks for sharing that, Patrick.

[bushido_man96]

Thanks for explaining this, Patrick.  I'll be looking into it!