Keeping track of forum posts

[CodePoet]

Recently I saw that someone had reacted on a topic from a month ago, but I only saw this by accident.

Although I am quite happy with the forum and the way it works and looks
I can’t figure out an efficient way to keep track of the development of topics I answered or opened.

I see the “RSS feed for this topic” link in the topic. But this adds a new rss feed for every topic. Please correct me if I’m wrong. Which could result in a lot of rss feeds and administration. In “View your profile” I can see a rss link on the posts overview page. When I press this I get a blank screen.

Maybe a rss feed which would show maybe a top 10 or top 20 (or 30) of posts list. With newly answered topics automatically on top. Maybe with some kind of image or text saying there is a new reply. I am not sure that is possible through RSS. Of course what happens if haven’t read topics for awhile and there are 70 new topic replies… The question is if this would have to be taken into account.

Something like that could greatly improve the efficiency of following the topics, and possibly increase user participation.

If I may ask why was the choice made for RSS instead of e-mail? I have no personal bias for either, actually think that RSS could possibly be a lot more efficient than yet another e-mail. On the other hand IMHO getting a pop-up message in your browser from every newsfeed if you have sixty newsfeeds isn’t exactly a calm relaxed surfing experience either.

As for now I would settle happily for a function to keep track of the topics easily in WordPress. Or am I overlooking some function on the forum which I can’t find somewhere?

If any programming assistance is needed for this please let me know, and I’ll gladly see if and where I can help.

Edit:

After six months of using the forum I just noticed the “Add this topic to your favorites(?)” function. That looks promising and very efficient. Is there any way to add a button in the profile which allows you to set the option that automatically adds all the posts you have reacted to, and have the newest reply go to the top of the feed?

[MichaelH]

About the only other thing available, besides the favorites, is to use the View your profile at the top of the screen by your login name.

Don’t forget to join the low-traffic wp-forum email list–sometimes posting there gets some traction by the Automattic personnel tasked with making feature changes to the Forum.