Today we are going to talk about how Follow works.  In the forum software, Follow works by notifying you to new content in the item you wish to follow. So, if you follow a blog, you get notified of new blog posts.  If you follow a blog post, you get notified of comments to that blog post.  If you follow a Forum, you are notified of new topics to the forum.  If you follow a topic, you're notified of new replies to the topic.

When you click the follow button, you get these options:

The default is "A Notification when new content is posted".  Right below that is "change how the notification is sent".  You can choose Inline (default) or email or both.

You can also choose a daily digest of updates (good on busy topics/blogs you follow) or a Weekly digest.  You can also choose to follow something and then not get notifications.  This is handy if you want to support the author without getting the alerts.

Since following at multiple levels can be confusing, I'd thought I'd use this blog as an example.  If you were one of the members following the blog "Anthology News", then you got a notification this Anthology Flashback blog was posted:

There are only 11 people following the blog at the moment... so this is a great time to click Follow (it changes to Following once you've done so)!

If you wanted to be alerted to comments on this blog post, you'd need to follow the blog post.  In the example above, you can see 5 people are following that blog post.

I was one of those followers so I could respond to comments and use reactions.  If you comment on a blog post and want to see what others think of your comment or if they reply, then following the blog post would alert you to any additional comments.

Now, we have a whole bunch of site news blogs I think are worth following that are intended to highlight writing tips, ideas, and stories.  Be sure to follow them here:

I hope this helps!  Let me know what you think in the comments below.  And be sure to like and follow those blogs. 

P.S.  The process described in following works in theory for Stories as well.  There are still some odd quirks with the system we are working to correct.  The proper advice here is to be sure to both follow and like a story.  You can also follow an author.  When you follow an author, you get notifications when they post new stories.  (Follow the Author to get notifications to new Stories. Follow a Story to get notifications to new Chapters).  We are actively trying to address the issue where you are not getting notified of new stories/chapters properly.  It is a very stubborn and persistent bug.