Right now, if I want to stay updated on a post or article - for example when someone might reply, edit their answer, or post a follow-up - the only available option is Bookmark. The problem is that Bookmark is really designed for saving content that's personally important to me for later reference, not for tracking activity on a thread.
This creates a few issues:
- My bookmarks list quickly becomes cluttered with items I only wanted to "watch" temporarily, mixed in with things I actually want to keep long-term (for example, the content from marketplace competitors).
- There's no clear, dedicated affordance that communicates "notify me about activity here," so new or occasional users likely don't even realize Bookmark is being used as a workaround for this.
Proposed idea: introduce a separate Watch (or "Follow") action on posts and articles, distinct from Bookmark, that:
- Sends an email notification (based on the user's existing notification preferences) when the watched post is edited/updated or receives a new comment.
- Can be toggled on automatically when a user comments on or creates a post, with an easy way to unwatch.
- Shows up in its own "Watching" list, kept separate from Bookmarks, so the two purposes don't get conflated.
This would bring Community in line with the "watch" pattern already familiar to Atlassian users from previous community platform, Jira or Confluence, and would make it much easier to follow ongoing discussions without repurposing a feature that wasn't built for that.
