If you are "subscribed" to a discussion forum, you'll receive a copy of every discussion and reply made in the forum—that's a lot of email! While your instructor may create a forum with "forced subscription" where everyone will receive a copy of every post, most forums are set up as "optional subscription," leaving you the choice to subscribe or not. Ask your instructor if you have questions about a particular forum.

If you do not wish to be subscribed to a forum that has optional subscription, you can update your Profile and/or Forum settings. (See note below regarding messages sent by an instructor via the Announcements forum.)

Unsubscribe from a Forum

To unsubscribe from a forum:

1. Open the forum.
2. Click on the admin "gear" in the upper right corner.
3. Click on Unsubscribe from this forum in the options menu.

Announcements Forums

All course participants are automatically subscribed to the Announcements forum. 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 one-way communication for instructors to post announcements for course participants. You cannot reply to an Announcements forum posting.

Optional Subscriptions

If you would like to subscribe to a forum, follow the instructions above for unsubscribing and click on Subscribe to this forum.

In addition to subscribing to an entire forum, you also have the option of following individual threads. Click on the gray envelope to the right of the subject line to subscribe to the thread. The envelope will  change color to indicate that you have subscribed to it as shown below.

Disable Auto-Subscribe (for accounts created prior to May 2015)

Note: Prior to Fall term 2015, the Moodle profile default was set to auto-subscribe you to a forum once you posted to it. Accounts created since May 2015 do not have this setting by default.

If you have an older account and are getting lots of email from forums, you can disable this setting (and stop future automatic subscriptions) by using the following instructions:

1. Open the drop-down menu next to your name in the top right corner of the Moodle page.
2. Click on Preferences.
3. Click on the Forum preferences link under User account in the left column.
4. 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. Note: These steps need to be taken in all of your current courses where you have posted to a discussion forum and generated a subscription.

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