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Why do I receive Forum notifications?

If you are subscribed to a Forum or a discussion in a Forum, you will receive notifications.

Depending on how a Forum has been set up, you may automatically be subscribed or you may have chosen to subscribe to a forum or a specific discussion. The following explains how you can manage your forum subscriptions.

Forum Activity settings

When setting up a Forum activity, the Subscription mode defines how subscriptions will work in the forum. There are four options available:

  • Forced subscription – course participants have no choice and they are subscribed to all discussions in that forum;
  • Optional subscription – course participants are not subscribed to any discussions in the forum but can choose to subscribe themselves;
  • Automatic subscription – course participants are, by default, subscribed to all discussions in the forum but can choose to unsubscribe;
  • Disabled subscription – course participants have no choice, subscription is not available in any of the discussions in that forum.

Discussion subscriptions

If the ‘Subscription mode’ has been selected as either Automatic Subscription or Optional Subscription then, as a course participant, you have the ability to control your subscription.

You can choose to subscribe to – or unsubscribe from – all discussions within a specific forum by selecting the appropriate option via the ‘gear’ icon inside the forum:

Screenshot of a main forum page with the option to 'Unsubscribe from this forum' highlighted in yellow.

Alternatively you can choose to which discussions you wish to subscribe/unsubscribe by toggling the Subscribe switch to the right of a discussion:

Screenshot of a main forum page with the options to toggle between subscribe and unsubscribe against each discussion in the forum highlighted in yellow.

View and manage forum subscriptions across whole course

It is possible to view and manage your forum subscriptions across all the forums in a course via a single page by following the instructions below:

  1. Go to the main course page
  2. Make a note of the course ‘id number’ in the URL:
A screenshot of a main course page with the course's id number highlighted in yellow in the URL bar.
  1. Replace the entire URL with:

    https://moodle.brookes.ac.uk/mod/forum/index.php?id=

    and then enter the course id number that you identified in step 2 above; so, in this example:
A screenshot of the URL bar showing the newly entered URL: https://moodle.brookes.ac.uk/mod/forum/index.php?id=4529.
  1. Then press Enter on your keyboard to go to the URL.
  2. On the resultant page, you will notice your current subscription setting against each forum in the course. To the right of some forums, you will see a black ‘button’ with the text Yes or No; clicking on this button will toggle between those two values allowing you to subscribe or unsubscribe accordingly:
Screenshot of the forum subscription page of a course. It shows a list of the forums in the course and a status as to whether you are subscribed or unsubscribed. The Subscribed column is highlighted in yellow.

For those forums where there is no black button to the right, your subscription cannot be modified (the forum has been configured as either Forced subscription or Subscription disabled).

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Updated on June 10, 2020

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