I’m going to be posting tips on how to use Discourse so we can become more familiar with it. The first important thing is how to watch a topic.
Let’s say there’s an interesting topic that you want to keep an eye on, say Kubectl tips and tricks. On each thread there is a little circle icon on the right side:
This is how you subscribe to a thread. If you want to receive every new tip posted, you would select “Watching”. If you post in a thread you’ll default to “Tracking”, which is usually enough to follow a conversation that you’re interested in, but not so much that you want a mail for every post. Generally speaking the top is the most spammy, and the bottom is to not be bothered at all.
Ok now let’s say you’re interested in a specific category. Categories are the main sections of the site that you see on the left side of the front page, Announcements, General Discussions, Events, etc. Let’s say you want to subscribe to the Announcements and only the announcements.
On the category page you’ll see the circle again:
This will let you select how you want to receive announcement notifications. Again, watching will send you everything, and muted will ignore. This section has a “watching first post”, which is nice for announcements because you get the first post, but don’t have to get the subsequent conversation if you don’t want to.
And lastly, you can subscribe to tag notifications. You’ll see we are adding tags as we get new content, this is what the one for Last Week in Kubernetes Development looks like:
and if you click through again, you’ll see this:
So what this allows you as a user to do, is not only subscribe to announcements, but subscribe to different tags across the site. Clicking on the circle here you will only get notifications for lwkd posts. This is immensely powerful because we can have tons of content in announcements, but slice it and dice it so people can subscribe to individual tags for things that interest them without having to drink from the firehose.
If you have any serial content that is posted regularly and want to have a tag just let us know and we’ll sort it out for you!
