FAQ for those who migrated from the vBulletin version of LFGSS

What I just did was go to the parent forum, made sure I had read the threads I was interested in, then marked everything as 'read'.
Still would prefer not to have to do that.

Does it not already work the right way? Follow a forum to follow everything then unfollow the shit you don't want.

I'm not following that shit in the first place.
We'll see if updates on the 'read' shit reappear.

Maybe. I'll check.

Yes, I think I can unfollow threads within a forum I follow.

Not sure if threads created in a forum that I already follow are auto followed.

Can you still create a forum for a city if your is not there?

Has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to Newport?

That sentence did not make sense.

But anyone can create a forum, the link is on the home page.

and @mashton

Are you sure that's how it should work?

If you followed Classifieds because you were in the market for a new bike... and you were then autofollowing the 100 conversations created in a couple of weeks, found a bike that you wanted... you now have to individually unfollow 100 conversations?

Should unfollowing a forum, not unfollow all of the things followed by virtue of following the forum?

The implicit "Follow all the things" would lead to an enormous chore for users who would then have to manually unfollow potentially hundreds or thousands of things.

This is made even worse if they had disabled email notification, followed a forum... and then gone on holiday or taken a break... only to return and suddenly have no way to collectively unfollow things.

It also breaks expectations. Everywhere else... if you follow a thing, you can unfollow the thing to reverse the effect of having followed it. Nowhere else would it leave any artifacts behind.

Are you really sure that's how it should work?

Think we are at cross purposes.

Unfollowing a forum should unfollow all the things in that forum.

What I was unsure about was the ability to:

1) follow a forum
2) unfollow any individual member element (e.g. thread) in that forum
3) have new elements created in that forum be automatically followed.

I now know that 1 and 2 are possible and expect 3 is the current behaviour, but am not sure.

An issue with me being on mobile most of the time is a lack of verbosity and ending up not being clear.

It wouldn't achieve anything if you're not also following the thread.

What do people think following a forum is going to do... if not tell you about updates to things in the forum?

Shit, now I just re-read this post and am confused again.

So following a forum != following all items (posts?) in that forum (and following all posts create within that forum, whilst you follow said forum) ?

So...

You're following some specific threads in the forum... say the Current Projects Discussion. And you love that, and it inspires you to follow the Current Projects forum to see the projects as they come up.

And so you follow the forum, and find that it's too noisy, and it's cluttering your Following with projects you don't care about... so you unfollow the forum.

Did you just unfollow Current Projects Discussion?

In your example, I think you just did. You've now implicitly lost things that you explicitly wanted to follow or had participated in.

The concept of following things at different scopes is hard enough, but introducing unexpected behaviour will really confuse people.

We keep it simple... but keeping it simple doesn't accommodate complex edge cases "All the things (except these things)"... it's "All the things" or "None of the things".

As soon as we touch complex edge cases, people will be bitten by unexpected behaviour.

OK, I get that, I think,

But what happens when I do the following, in this order:

1) Follow Current Projects
2) Unfollow Current Project Discussion

Did I just implicitly stop following Current Projects?

If that's all you did, then you could never do #2. You weren't following it... you were following the forum which contained it.

If you blithely ignored that fact, then you would need to do this:

1) Follow Current Projects
2) Follow Current Projects Discussion
3) Unfollow Current Project Discussion

The Follow on the forum still exists, the discussion would still be on your Following page.

You cannot follow a Forum and somehow express "but not these things in the forum".

Follows include things, they do not negate/exclude things. There's no set theory subtraction going on here, it's addition only.

So following a forum doesn't tick the follow box on every thread in that forum, it, it just ticks one box at forum level. I couldn't follow the polo forum then go and unfollow just the regular London sessions I have no real interest in. I wrongly assumed it would work more like a "select all" kind of thing.

I am confused. If I follow a forum then I get all the notifications about the threads in that forum? I can't decide that some threads are of no interest to me and mark them in that way?

EDIT: Too slow typing, turns out I was thinking the same thing as @snottyotter, which is, quite frankly, terrifying.

Yep, that's what I thought too.

Bring the motherfucking set theory.

Exactly that.

Following the forum is to say "Follow the forum".

If you didn't want to follow the forum, don't.

Instead, follow just the things you want to follow and check the forum every now and then to see if new things you want to follow exist.

Eventually... when we add "ignore"... you could use that to exclude things... that's the exclude/hide/remove mechanism. But it will be effective, so if you suddenly decide you are interested in the regular sessions then you will need to remove the ignore to be able to see a thing about it.

I can't wait for the ignore function.

I think I'd prefer a 'follow all including new' kind of behaviour and then deselect what I don't want to follow but don't hate enough to ignore, or at least have a sliding scale of ignoreness, like ignore from following page but not forum page or something.

Instead, follow just the things you want to follow and check the forum every now and then to see if new things you want to follow exist.

This is pretty mush what I do now. It feels like I'm manually working around a missing "auto-follow new threads in this forum from now on" switch.

I think both behaviours are desirable! Depending on how what level of interest I have in a particular topic/forum. Different forums are going to engender different levels of engagement, an argument of breadth versus depth.

The more I think about this the less sure I know what the question is let alone the answer.

This is pretty mush what I do now. It feels like I'm manually working around a missing "auto-follow new threads in this forum from now on" switch.

This is what "Follow Forum" does.

The only thing it doesn't do is store those as thousands of individual follows that you would have to manually remove later.

sliding scale of ignoreness

Or the old rate-this-thread thing, with your ratings feeding strongly into which threads are considered important for you, and the average of everyone else's ratings feeding into it a bit as well.

BTW, freaking awesome use of the HTML mark there.

I've written half the stuff around here, and even though I wrote that in, whitelisted, and everything... I didn't quite click how it would render.