One of our instructors suggested two useful enhancements for filtering forum notifications in large courses. One of them is to add an option to send notifications for replies to posts that the user has made. The other one is already being addressed through MDL-1626.

I am copying below the original message from the instructor to show the context for this suggestion:

"I have a minor concern about the forum interface for Moodle. If I want to track a specific few threads on a Moodle forum, the only way to do so (besides checking manually) is to subscribe to the forum. But this causes updates to be sent for EVERY post made on the forum. With some of the larger classes, this can lead to a lot of unwanted emails or even popups quite quickly, sometimes burying notifications for the topics that I would want to track and causing a fair amount of hassle in deleting the excess messages.

I believe the best solution would be to add an option to subscribe to individual threads, and/or add a settings option to send notifications for replies to posts that the user has made."