What's the difference between

[AsleepInYorkshire]

And no this is not for the Laughing Lemons board (exceptionally poor grammar award for AiY )

Subscribing to a topic & Bookmarking a topic please?

Thank you for all sensible responses - sorry my bad - but I'm beginning to understand your sense of humour

AiY

[mc2fool]

a) You can subscribe to either a forum or a topic, but you can only bookmark a topic.

b) The two appear in different lists in your user control panel:
https://www.lemonfool.co.uk/ucp.php?i=ucp_main&mode=subscribed and
https://www.lemonfool.co.uk/ucp.php?i=ucp_main&mode=bookmarks

c) You can set up different notifications for them: https://www.lemonfool.co.uk/ucp.php?i=ucp_notifications&mode=notification_options

[Gengulphus]

I'm not certain whether you really meant to ask what the differences are, or whether you knew what they were and actually wanted to know why it can be useful to have them. If the former, I can't really improve on mc2fool's answer, but if it's the latter, here's why I find them useful (note that it's just an example and I'm not saying there aren't other ways of making good use of them):

There are some forums on TLF for which I want to read a lot of the material that is posted, and to have my attention drawn to that material even when I've no idea that it's going to come up for discussion. Probably the purest case of that is the "Games, Puzzles and Riddles" forum - I have no idea at all what puzzles people are going to choose to post there, I just want to know when a new puzzle is posted so that I can have a look and decide whether I'm interested in trying to solve it. There are other forums for which I will occasionally want to read a particular topic because I'm interested in seeing what people are saying about something I've read about elsewhere, typically on the news - the purest case of that is probably "Polite Discussions", where most of the material is (IMHO) endless rehashes of arguments I've seen ad nauseam elsewhere, but occasionally there's a question on which I want to see a wider range of views than I've seen elsewhere (or at least see whether such a wider range of views is actually being expressed...).

I.e. basically there are forums on which I want other people to be able to actively attract my attention, and others on which I want to be left alone to decide entirely for myself whether to take any interest at all - even enough interest to look through a list of topic titles and pick out ones that I am interested in.

That's the 'forum' side of things, now the 'topic' side. For that, I typically know once I've seen a topic whether I want to see any more of it (*) - this is usually much more definite knowledge than I have about forums. E.g. I know that there's a fairly high chance that I'll be interested in a topic of the "Games, Puzzles and Riddles" forum - but it's still probabilistic knowledge, whereas once I've seen a particular puzzle, I can be pretty certain either that I am interested in it or that I'm not. This means that all four combinations of interest in a forum and interest in a specific topic on that forum exist - I can be generally interested in a forum and also interested in the specific topic, generally interested in a forum but not interested in the specific topic, generally not interested in a forum but make an exception for a particular topic I find of interest, or neither generally interested in a forum nor interested in a specific topic on it.

Given all that, what works well for me is using subscribing to a forum to indicate general interest in that forum and in particular in having new topics on that forum drawn to my attention, and bookmarking topics to indicate specific interest in that particular topic and in particular in having new posts to that topic drawn to my attention. That way, I can express general interest in a forum and specific interest in a topic completely independently of each other (I've never bothered to work out exactly how subscribing to a forum and subscribing to a topic interact with each other - it may be that they can, but it certainly isn't obvious whether they can or not).

I don't use subscribing to a topic at all, only subscribing to forums and bookmarking topics, so somewhat pedantically I'm not using the difference between subscribing to a topic and bookmarking a topic: to use a difference properly, one really ought to be using both options and get something useful out of making some decisions about which option to choose one way and others the opposite way. But I do use the fact that bookmarking a topic behaves completely independently of subscribing to a forum, while subscribing to a topic either doesn't behave completely independently of subscribing to a forum or at least doesn't obviously do so.

But while I don't use them myself, there are ways to use both subscribing to a topic and bookmarking a topic that actually make good use of the difference between them in that somewhat pedantic sense. For instance, it may be that there are topics that you want to keep active track of, watching out for new posts on them, and others you simply want to be able to find again easily if you should happen to want to refer to them in the future but have no wish to see new additions to them until and unless you actually do wish to refer to them again. Subscribing to the first type of topic and bookmarking the second, while having the "Someone replies to a topic to which you are subscribed" notification option turned on and the "Someone replies to a topic you have bookmarked" notification option turned off (or the same thing with the roles of subscribing and bookmarking reversed) will meet that desire well.

(*) Well, I do if it remains "on-topic" - i.e. about the subject that it's ostensibly about. If it drifts into other subjects, I might become interested in it when I wasn't before, or cease to be interested in it when I was before. The former is liable to be a poor move for the person who chooses to drift off-topic rather than start a new topic, since I and anyone else who uses a similar reading technique will probably never see what they're posting about despite potentially having interesting stuff to say about it. The latter presents me with an awkward "baby vs bathwater" choice: continue reading the topic in the hope that somebody will say something more about what it's supposed to be about, or give up reading it and with that any hope of seeing any such thing.

Gengulphus

[csearle]

Holy mackerel.

[csearle]

Holy mackerel.

I love him really. I just gasp sometimes at the attention to detail. <3. C.