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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.
mashton-
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.
Velocio
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?