Suggestion: Auto-follow replied to discussions

[Troy Fisher]

As the site continues to grow it can be more difficult to follow conversations, and I almost always forget to "follow" the conversation, most forums auto-follow after you reply.  Or perhaps it could be an option we could set, I can't imagine some of our 14k reply people auto-following but it could drive more involvement in threads that haven't creeped up to that hot topic spot.

[Matt Devincenzo]

@Account Closed up at the top of the thread, just to the right and below the thread's "heading" there are three buttons "follow topic" "start new thread" and "reply here". If you click the follow button it will automatically email you anytime there is a new post in the thread. 

You can also go to your dashboard and the far right tab is "followed discussions". It's similar to the "my discussions" tab in that you can see what has most recently been replied to, the difference being it's only the threads you're following as opposed to all the threads you've responded to. It's nice (for me personally) on threads I may be interested in learning more about, but don't necessarily have anything meaningful to contribute. Or those that are interesting like a deal diary or something similar that I just want to keep up with.

I can see the utility of it, but dislike getting the auto follow on other platforms. I like the idea of being able to "auto follow", but have it be an account setting you can choose. Then if you want to be able to use the feature you can turn it on for yourself, but others like me that might not want it don't have to use it.