Can someone explain "watch threads"?

[cronker]

Hello

I use the watch thread feature quite often, as the thread is interesting to me.
What I have noticed, though, is that some threads go off my watch thread, and I have to find them again.
What's with that?

 

[Lobster11]

Funny you'd mention that. The last few days I've had two or three experiences in which I was browsing "New Posts" and saw that a thread I was watching was near the top of the list, but I didn't remember having received an "alert" about it. When I go to read the new post, I see that I'm still "watching" the thread, because the "Unwatch Thread" option is there. The watch/alert system works so well most of the time I just figured I must have just overlooked the alert, or that there was some delay between the new post and the alert (and if I had waited another minute I would've received the alert), or something else I shouldn't worry about. I wouldn't have thought about it any further if I hadn't seen your post, and now I wonder if something isn't working quite right. (Or maybe we're both just drinking too much tequila?)

 

[Lobster11]

So this just happened to me again: I missed several pages of new posts in a thread I've been watching because I didn't get an alert about them (or, at least I don't remember getting one). The thread didn't go off my watch list; I just don't remember getting an alert about new posts.

Unless you have confirmed that these threads have actually been deleted from your watched-threads list, here's what I think is happening (at least, to me). When a new post appears in a watched thread, you get an alert about it. Once you've been sent this alert, you won't get any more -- no matter how many additional new posts appear -- until you actually click on the alert, which then takes you to the appropriate point of the thread. Once you've read the rest of the thread from that point, the alert system resets, so that now you'll receive an alert when something new is posted there.

What I think happens sometimes to me is that I sit down at the computer and find four or five alerts waiting for me about different threads. I click on them one by one to visit and catch up on those threads, but sometimes I think I just wind up overlooking one of the alerts and never click on it. Meanwhile, new posts continue to pile up in that thread, without me receiving any alerts. Eventually I stumble back to that thread some other way -- e.g., I see it in the "New Posts" list -- at which point I discover that there are a bunch of new posts I didn't know about. By this point I don't remember having ever received an alert, but the problem is just that I overlooked the alert when it initially arrived among a batch of other alerts. Does that make sense?

On the other hand, if some of your watched threads really are randomly disappearing from your watched list, never mind. In that case there must be something wrong in the system, and I wouldn't even try to hazard a guess.

 

[paul]

So this just happened to me again: I missed several pages of new posts in a thread I've been watching because I didn't get an alert about them (or, at least I don't remember getting one). The thread didn't go off my watch list; I just don't remember getting an alert about new posts.

Unless you have confirmed that these threads have actually been deleted from your watched-threads list, here's what I think is happening (at least, to me). When a new post appears in a watched thread, you get an alert about it. Once you've been sent this alert, you won't get any more -- no matter how many additional new posts appear -- until you actually click on the alert, which then takes you to the appropriate point of the thread. Once you've read the rest of the thread from that point, the alert system resets, so that now you'll receive an alert when something new is posted there.

What I think happens sometimes to me is that I sit down at the computer and find four or five alerts waiting for me about different threads. I click on them one by one to visit and catch up on those threads, but sometimes I think I just wind up overlooking one of the alerts and never click on it. Meanwhile, new posts continue to pile up in that thread, without me receiving any alerts. Eventually I stumble back to that thread some other way -- e.g., I see it in the "New Posts" list -- at which point I discover that there are a bunch of new posts I didn't know about. By this point I don't remember having ever received an alert, but the problem is just that I overlooked the alert when it initially arrived among a batch of other alerts. Does that make sense?

On the other hand, if some of your watched threads really are randomly disappearing from your watched list, never mind. In that case there must be something wrong in the system, and I wouldn't even try to hazard a guess.

I think this is what happens most of the time when users report missing alerts. @cronker are you certain the threads are actually off your watch list? Or perhaps they are still there but not just in your *unread* watched list? Note that you have to click on "show all watched threads" to get your full list...