Recently a member pointed out that they were getting notifications of closed topics and asked how they can clear the notifications so they don’t have to go through them. This brought to my attention that we do not have a tutorial for adjusting your notifications!
What are Notifications?
This is a very simple question with a very simple answer. Notifications are the numbers that show up when you have something new to see. You can receive a notification for many different things such as replies, warnings, reviews, and tags. Many notifications are set automatically such as for new messages, tags, and posts under review. However, you have control over your other notifications!
Notification Dashboard
To get to your notification settings, click or tap on your profile picture, click or tap the little person icon, and select “Preferences”. You will come to a screen that looks something like this.
There are four options here for Notifications and they each control something different.
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Notifications: This is your overall forum-wide notification settings.
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Categories: These are your notifications per category.
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Users: This is your user-based settings.
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Tags: These are your notifications per tag.
Let’s go through each one so you can easily set up your notifications in a way that works for you.
Notifications
On the sidebar, select “Notifications”.
Now you will see a screen that looks something like this.
Let’s start from the top, shall we? You have four options under Notifications. These options are…
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Consider topics new when…
This setting tells the forum how it should notify you of new posts. You can adjust this be for topics you haven’t read yet, topics created in X amount of days, or topics that are new since your last login. -
Automatically track topics I enter…
This setting tells the forum how quickly you want it to track your involvement in a topic. You can change this from never, immediate, X amount of seconds, or X amount of minutes. This way if you don’t spend too much time in a topic and you don’t reply, you won’t get notifications of new replies to that topic. -
When I post in a topic, set that topic to…
Your options here are Watching, Tracking, or Normal. This lets the forum know how you want to be notified of replies in a topic since you replied.
– Watching: You will be notified of every new reply in the topic, and a count of new replies will be shown.
– Tracking: A count of new replies will be shown for this topic. You will be notified if someone mentions your name or replies to you.
– Normal: You will be notified if someone mentions your name or replies to you. -
Notify when liked…
This option here lets you know when someone likes your post(s). You can adjust it to four different settings: Always, First time and daily, first time, or never.
Live Notifications
This setting allows for the Spells8 forum to send you live notifications in your browser. This setting will not work if you have notifications turned off in your browser. If you do not have them turned off then you can adjust this setting to let your browser send you notifications of Spells8 activity.
Notification Schedule
If you do not want to see notifications during specific times of day on specific days, you can choose to enable a custom notification schedule. This lets you adjust the times that notifications will be shown on each day. Think of this as a “Do Not Disturb” setting for the forum.
Messages
This little checkbox is not shown in the image but it is at the bottom. If you do not want to recieve personal messages from other members, uncheck the box. This does not stop moderators and forum staff from sending you messages!
Category Dashboard
Now select “Categories” from the left side of the screen. Here, this will give you category-specific notification settings. Your screen should look something like this.
On this screen, you can adjust notification settings for each category here in the forum. If you want to watch every single post in the #witchy-wisdom category, you would select that category in the first option for “Watched”. You can mute categories if you do not want to be notified of anything about new topics there.
Here is another short breakdown of what each term means.
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Watched: You will automatically watch all topics in these categories. You will be notified of all new posts and topics, and a count of new posts will also appear next to the topic.
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Tracked: You will automatically track all topics in these categories. A count of new posts will appear next to the topic.
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Watching First Post: You will be notified of the first post in each new topic in these categories.
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Muted: You will not be notified of anything about new topics in these categories, and they will not appear on the categories or latest pages.
Users Dashboard
If you want to get more specific with who you do and do not see on the forum, you want this dashboard. These settings allow you to ignore members (in essence, this blocks them) or mute them. You can also allow for only selected members to send you personal messages. Your screen should look something like this.
You can set a time limit for ignoring members. When you select “+Add” under the Ignored option, a popup will show up that lets you select the member and a specific timeframe. These timeframes range in duration to a few hours, a few days, weeks, months, or forever. That choice is yours.
Please note that you cannot ignore or mute staff members.
Tags Dashboard
Just like the categories dashboard, you can track specific tags. On this screen you can choose to watch, track, or mute certain tags. Please see the above reference for those words. When looking at this dashboard, your screen will look something like this.
Don’t forget to save your changes!
Post-Specific Options
You can choose how you get notified of replies or activity in a specific post in the same way that you did above for entire categories! Down at the bottom of a post, you will have a dropdown menu with the options of Watching, Tracking, Normal, or Muted. This way if you are finished with a conversation for whatever reason, you can mute the post. If you want to watch the conversation but have not replied yet, you can still track the post!
Dismissing Notifications
The wonderful @BryWisteria wrote a very simple guide to dismissing your notifications. Without writing it over again, you can find that guide here → Dismissing Notifications
I hope I didn’t miss anything in this tutorial for adjusting your notifications! Please let me know if you have any questions or if I missed something entirely. We want you to enjoy your time here with us in the Infinite Roots Coven. Part of that is curating how you receive notifications!
Megan 
I thought I knew notifications, but it looks like what I knew before was just the tip of the iceberg- there are so many ways to customize your notifcations in the forum!
