We will soon be introducing a new sidebar and a new notifications menu into the forum to help you find and focus on what is most important to you.
The new sidebar lets you customize your navigation so you can get to your favorite parts of your community, and the new notifications menu that lets you more easily decide which of your notifications deserve your attention now and which ones can be dismissed or be saved for later.
New sidebar
The new sidebar includes a community section that has some common links everyone will need to access, and additional sections for your favorite categories and tags, your personal messages, and any chat channels that you’ve joined.
Anonymous users (visitors who are not logged in), see sections for the most popular tags and categories.
Add categories and tags to your sidebar
Click the pencil icon next to the categories or tags sections to be taken to your sidebar preferencespage to add categories or tags to your own sidebar. Counts for new and unread topics are shown alongside any categories and tags you choose to add to your sidebar.
Adding categories or tags does not automatically watch or track them, so you won’t get additional notifications unless you choose to do so separately.
New notifications menu
The new notifications menu has tabs for each type of notification so when you’re looking for those two recent replies but have gotten a few more recent likes and mentions, you can find them easily without navigating away from the current page.
Counts for different types of unread notifications are shown on each tab so you can see at a glance what kinds of things may be waiting for you. Dismiss a subset of notifications on a given tab when you want to clear one out but still want to follow up on the others.