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:

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

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:
- Go to the main course page
- Make a note of the course ‘id number’ in the URL:

- 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:

- Then press Enter on your keyboard to go to the URL.
- 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:
