Following Boards and Topics: Subscriptions and Digest Frequency

Overview

A forum is only useful if people come back to it. Discussions lets every member decide how: follow a whole board to hear about every new topic, follow a single topic to hear about its replies, and choose for each subscription whether the news should arrive immediately, once a day or once a week. Authors are subscribed to their own topics automatically, and one click is enough to stop following anything.

Subscriptions replace the classic SharePoint Alerts that the old Discussion Board relied on — a mechanism that Microsoft is retiring in July 2026 and that never offered per-topic subscriptions or digests. The web part keeps the subscriptions in a list on your site; the email itself is sent by a Power Automate flow configured by the site owner.

The Follow button

The Follow button with a bell icon appears in two places:

• in the command bar of the board, next to New topic — this follows the board;
• in the header of an open topic, next to Back to topics — this follows that topic.

The button is a split button. Clicking its main part follows the board or topic with the Immediately frequency; clicking the arrow opens a menu with the three frequencies and Unfollow.

Once you follow, the button changes to Following with a filled bell and shows the chosen frequency — for example Following · Daily digest. From then on:

• clicking the main part of the button unfollows;
• picking another frequency in the menu changes it in place, without creating a second subscription;
• Unfollow in the menu does the same as the main button.

The button is shown to users who can post on the board (the Add items permission); readers cannot follow. It is hidden when the Discussions Subscriptions list is missing on the site — see Where subscriptions are stored.

Frequencies

The frequency belongs to each subscription separately: you can follow the board weekly and a hot topic immediately. There is no global "mute" switch — to stop all emails from a board, unfollow the board and the topics you follow in it. Mentions are independent of all of this: a person who is @mentioned is notified regardless of their subscriptions (see KB10403. Using @Mentions in Discussions).

Automatic subscriptions

When you create a topic, the web part subscribes you to it with the Immediately frequency, so you learn about answers to your own question without doing anything. Open the topic and use the Following button to switch to a digest or to unfollow. Replying to a topic does not subscribe you to it; follow it explicitly if you want to see how the thread continues.

What each subscription delivers

The notification contract of Discussions defines which subscribers are addressed by which event:

Only approved content triggers notifications: on a board that requires approval, a topic or reply is announced when the moderator approves it, not when it is submitted. Each email links to the topic through the ?topic=<Id> parameter of the page that hosts the web part, so the recipient lands directly in the thread — see KB10407. Sharing a Link to a Topic in Discussions (Deep Links).

Where subscriptions are stored

Every subscription is one item in the Discussions Subscriptions list of the site — one row per user and per followed object:

Following creates the row, changing the frequency updates it and unfollowing deletes it. The list is created together with the other Discussions lists; on a site where the board was set up by the first preview build, a site owner adds it by opening the page in edit mode once. Like all Discussions lists it inherits the permissions of the site, so members can technically open it in Site contents and see who follows what; a site owner who prefers to keep that private can give the list unique permissions — the web part reads and writes it in the name of the current user and only needs that user to add, edit and delete their own rows.