Did you know that it’s possible for course participants to see how many unread posts they have in a Moodle forum?

To ensure users are kept up-to-date with discussions in course forums, we normally recommend that course participants are subscribed to the forums so that any new post will be sent as an email to the user. However, by being potentially subscribed to many forums across a number of courses, notifications may “clog up” a student’s inbox; or perhaps the email arrives when the user’s attention is focussed elsewhere and the notification is then forgotten about as other emails arrive.

The alternative solution to being subscribed is for the course page itself to highlight any forums that have “unread” posts when the user next visits.

The user will be able to see from the course page where posts have been made since they last visited the forum.

By clicking on the Forum activity, the user is presented with the list of discussions; any discussions with “unread posts” are identified with a number (in a pink circle) indicating how many unread posts there are:

When the user then visits that discussion, any unread posts are indicated by a yellow header:

“So how do I make this happen?”

In order for the user to take advantage of this feature, they will need to change their own forum preferences.

1. The user will need to click on their name in the top-right corner of the page and select Preferences from the drop-down menu:

2. On the ‘Preferences’ page, the user should click on Forum preferences.
3. The ‘Forum tracking’ setting needs to be set to Yes: highlight new posts for me:

4. The user should then click on Save changes to confirm the change.

In the Forum Preferences, there is an additional setting which determines whether Moodle will highlight unread posts in any forums to which the user is already subscribed (ie. for which they receive forum post notifications).

In the above screenshot, the setting 'When sending forum post notifications' is set to Do not mark the post as read. If the user does NOT want unread posts to be highlighted if they are subscribed to that Forum, they should set this to Mark the post as read.