In the preferences, in “Notifications”, the “Automatically track topics I enter”, by default, is “after 4 minutes”. If I understand correctly, it means that the forum won’t consider a topic as read unless I’ve spent at least 4 minutes reading it.
Why? I don’t think the forum should make assumptions about my reading speed, and anyway, even though I can read English only relatively slowly, I can often decide that a topic doesn’t interest me in less than 4 minutes, or even read it entirely if it’s short. Couldn’t the default just be “immediately”?
“Immediately” wouldn’t be helpful because that means you would track every topic you open, even if you just glance at it and find it’s not interesting. You’d have to manually un-track it and then it would re-track if you checked it again.
I believe they chose 4 minutes as a default because if you spend 5 minutes reading a topic, that’s likely indicative of interest. If you manually change it to “immediately” or whatever you want, you shouldn’t need to do it again.
Tracking means the topic will appear in your Unread page, and the latest page will show how many new replies there are. Unless you mute a topic you’ll always get notifications for direct replies or mentions.
