Forum Subscription and Tracking

Subscribing to a forum allows you to receive email notifications whenever someone posts to the forum. However, the ability to do so is dependent on the setting your instructor chooses for each forum. There are several settings that your instructor can choose from:

• Forced subscription: everyone is subscribed to the forum and you cannot opt-out of email notifications
• Auto subscription: everyone is subscribed initially to the forum, but you can choose to unsubscribe at any time
• Optional subscription: no one is subscribed initially to the forum, but you can choose to subscribe at any time
• Subscription disabled: no one can subscribe to the forum

Tracking will show you what posts you have not read yet on the course home page, on the main page of the forum, and within each thread. By default this is available, but your instructor does have the ability to turn it off for a forum.

Overview

• Setting Your Forum Subscription and Tracking Preferences
• Subscribing/Unsubscribing to a Specific Forum or Discussion Thread

Setting Your Forum Subscription and Tracking Preferences

1. On your My Courses page, click Preferences under your name at the top.

2. Click on Forum Preferences under User Account.

3. Email digest type: you can choose to receive email notifications as a digest (one email per day) or not (one email per forum post). The digest options are “Complete (daily email with full posts” or “Subjects (daily email with subjects only).” Note: you cannot reply to digest email notifications. For more information on see our help guide on email replies to forum posts.

4. Forum auto-subscribe: Select “Yes: when I post, subscribe me to that forum discussion” to automatically receive notifications for discussion threads that you post or reply to. Select “No: don’t automatically subscribe me to forum discussions” if you want to choose which specific discussions to subscribe to.

5. Forum tracking: Select “Yes: highlight new posts for me” to enable forum tracking.

6. When sending forum post notifications: If you select “Mark the post as read” a post will be marked as read once an email notification is sent to you for that post. If you select “Do not mark that post as read” posts will only be marked as read if you read them in the forum.

7. Click Save changes at the bottom of the page.

Subscribing/Unsubscribing to a Specific Forum or Discussion Thread

To subscribe/unsubscribe to a forum

1. On your course homepage, click on Course Dashboard on the right under the Contents area.

2. Find the Activities block and click on Forums.

Note: your instructor may have removed this block. If so, locate a forum in the course and click on the forum name. Click the Search Forums button at the top. At the very top of the page, in the breadcrumbs above the course name, click Forums.

3. This page will display all of the forums in the course. The Subscribed column will show you whether or not you are already subscribed to a forum. Yes means you are subscribed, No means you are not. To subscribe to a forum, click on No for that forum to turn it into Yes. If you cannot click on No it means your instructor has disabled subscriptions for that forum.

4. To unsubscribe from a forum, click on Yes for that forum to turn it into No. If you cannot click on Yes it means your instructor has set that forum to auto-subscription.

To subscribe/unsubscribe to a discussion thread

1. Locate the forum in your course and click on the Forum name.

2. To subscribe to a specific discussion thread in that forum, click the Subscribe toggle switch to the right of the thread. If it is gray and to the left, it means you are unsubscribed. Once you click it, the button will move to the right and be blue, which indicates you are subscribed.

3. To unsubscribe to a specific discussion thread in that forum, click the Subscribe toggle switch to the right of the thread. If it is blue and to the right, it means you are subscribed. Once you click it, the button will move to the left and be gray, which indicates you are unsubscribed.