Communication Tools and Settings

Controlling Forum Subscriptions


Your webCampus course can generate a lot of email if you have very active discussion forums. However, you can control whether or not you are "subscribed" to a forum - it's your choice whether you receive new forum posts in your email or just view them in your course. You can even control whether you receive an individual email every time a message is posted or if you want to receive one summary email per day that includes posts from all forums to which you subscribe.

If you do not wish to receive these emails, you can minimize or prevent them by changing your Profile and/or Forum settings. (See note below regarding messages sent by an instructor via the news forum.)

1. How to Edit your Forum Preferences

The profile default is set to auto-subscribe you to a forum once you post to it. You can disable this setting (and stop future automatic subscriptions) by doing the following:

  1. Click Preferences in your profile options in the top right corner of the site.
  2. Under User account, click Forum Preferences.

Select Email Digest Type to Control webCampus Email Frequency

If you want to reduce the number of emails you receive from your subscribed forums, set the Email digest type to either Complete (daily email with full posts) or Subjects (daily email with subjects only). Either of these settings will send you a single email at with all of the posts of the last 24 hours in a single message and will include links to the course forum. 

Screen shot of forum preferences window

Choose the Email digest type that works best for you:

  • No digest - you will receive one e-mail per forum post
  • Complete (daily email with full posts) - you will receive one digest e-mail per day at 5 p.m. (Pacific) containing the complete contents of each forum post
  • Subjects only (daily email with subjects only) - you will receive one digest e-mail per day at 5 p.m. containing just the subject of each forum post.


Disable Auto-Subscribe 

Locate the Forum Auto-Subscribe field and use the pull-down menu to change the setting to No: don't automatically subscribe me to forums.

This setting will apply to future forums in which you post in all of your course sites. If you are currently subscribed to a forum, you must unsubscribe yourself as shown below.

Screen shot of forum subscribe options

Bonus Tip: Set the Forum tracking option to Yes, highlight new posts for me. When you go to your course, this setting indicates when new messages have been posted by your instructor and classmates.

Screen shot of forum tracking options


2. Unsubscribe from Currently Subscribed Forums

Unlike updating your profile which effects this change for all of your courses, this process needs to be completed in each of your current courses where you have participated in a discussion forum and generated a subscription.

To unsubscribe from a forum:

  1. Open the forum.
  2. Click on Unsubscribe from this forum in the Administration block.

Bonus Tip: In "Advanced forums," you can also see who has posted to a forum by clicking on View posters, or download the discussion posts by clicking Export.

Forum subscription screen shot

Optional Subscriptions

When you post to a discussion forum, your instructor may give you the option of subscribing to it. To subscribe, click on the link in the Administration block.

Some forums may be set up so that everyone is subscribed without having the option to unsubscribe. Ask your instructor if you have questions about a particular forum.

Note: The Course News and Announcements forum is the one forum from which you cannot unsubscribe. Instructors use this forum to communicate important information about the course, so everyone in the course will receive an email when the instructor posts to this forum. It's helpful to know, too, that this is not a true forum—it's a form of one-way communication for instructors to post announcements for course participants. You cannot reply to a news forum posting.


The Activities block for course Forum subscription management

Activities Block

Your course includes an Activities block which allows you to review course activities and manage your course forum subscriptions. If your course includes both standard Forums and Open Forums, you will need to manage each forum type separately. 

Select the Forums or Open Forums link in the Activities block.

  Forums & Open Forums

The following page will open:

Manage forum subscriptions

There are links to subscribe to or unsubscribe from all forums. Yes! This does it for the entire course with one click. 

Optionally, you can have fine control over each forum via the Email digest type drop-down menu. Use this control if you want to be subscribed, but want to choose between a single email for each post (No digest), the complete post in a one-email-per-day digest, or just the post subject in a one-email-per-day digest.