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

- Click on Forum Preferences under User Account.

- 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 鈥淐omplete (daily email with
full posts鈥 or 鈥淪ubjects (daily email with subjects only).鈥 Note: you cannot reply to digest email notifications. For more information on see our
help guide on email replies to forum posts.

- Forum auto-subscribe: Select 鈥淵es: when I post, subscribe me to that forum discussion鈥 to automatically
receive notifications for discussion threads that you post or reply to. Select 鈥淣o:
don鈥檛 automatically subscribe me to forum discussions鈥 if you want to choose which
specific discussions to subscribe to.

- Forum tracking: Select 鈥淵es: highlight new posts for me鈥 to enable forum tracking.

- When sending forum post notifications: If you select 鈥淢ark the post as read鈥 a post will be marked as read once an email
notification is sent to you for that post. If you select 鈥淒o not mark that post as
read鈥 posts will only be marked as read if you read them in the forum.

- Click Save changes at the bottom of the page.

Subscribing/Unsubscribing to a Specific Forum or Discussion Thread
To subscribe/unsubscribe to a forum
- On your course homepage, click on Course Dashboard on the right under the Contents area.

- 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.
- 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.

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

- 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.

- 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.
