After a comment from @hcorrin and some additional thought on the subject, I’ve changed the security settings on this category (Announcements). Previously the category was reas-only for anyone other than admins/mods. The new settings are that only admins/mods can create new posts, but once a post has been created then any logged in user can reply.
This will obviously affect my original intention to have a low bandwidth category that everyone could watch without being flooded by messages (not that we see many floods these days!)
So, if you’d prefer my original way of working this, there is a way for you just to be notified about the first post in a new topic but not subsequent replies (whoever posts them). If you’d like that, change your preference like this:
- Go to the Tracking page in your profile preferences - https://discourse.weather-watch.com/my/preferences/tracking
- Scroll down the settings and in the left hand ‘Categories’ column near the bottom of the page you’ll see a ’ Watching First Post’ section.
- Click in the ‘Select +’ box to display a list of categories and click on ‘Announcements’.
- Click ‘Save Changes’
With that setting changed you’ll get notified of new topics created by admins/mods but not any replies. You’ll still be able to see the replies, but you’ll have to visit the category to see which topics have replies and open those you want to read.
If there’s ever a topic that you want to follow whilst you have ‘Watching First Post’ enabled, you can enable notifications on all subsequent replies to the topic. If you scroll to the bottom of the topic/replies you’ll see a drop down menu, e.g. ‘Normal’ in this image:
It may say something different depending on your settings, but click the menu and select ‘Watching’ to get notifications of other replies.
Thes tracking options will work on all categories, so if you’d prefer you can set so that you only ever get notifications for the first posts in a new topic and then choose which ones to follow more fully once you’ve read the first post. Just select a different category in step (3) above. You can select multiple categories here.