I want to remove one or two of these items from our top-level menu to free up some space and set the stage for upcoming improvements. They have overlapping functionality and don't all need to be there. Here is what each of them does:
- New - a list of topics to which you have posted in the past that contain unread replies
- Unread - a list of all forum topics that contain unread replies
- Notifications - a list of topics that you have elected to receive notifications about
The "New" feature is going get some enhancements fairly soon that will allow you to manage which topics appear in this query a little more directly. It will still be driven by topics that you have posted in, but you'll be able to opt-out threads that you don't care about and maybe even opt-into threads that you haven't replied to yet. It will probably also be renamed to something more intuitive, like "watch".
Even though "Spy" has some overlap with "Unread", I deliberately left it out of the poll because it is a live feed and I know it is popular. The other difference is that Spy is a list of posts while Unread is a list of topics. I was thinking of putting a link to "All Unread Topics" on the Spy page. The Spy itself will get a face lift and have its guts replaced with something better in the near future.
It sounds like this "watch" thing is a lot like Notifications, so why bother right? You can enable "Turn notification on when you post or reply to a topic.", disable email notifications, and select to be notified of "Nothing at all" to suppress the emails and get the same behavior. Because these are global settings in your profile in SMF, it effectively kills the notification feature for all topics. What if there are certain topics to which you wish to receive an email? Some vBulletin configurations let you set the notification type on a per-topic basis, but SMF does not work this way.
My inclination is to move "Notifications" into the "Profile" sub-menu, move "Unread" onto the Spy page and also maybe into the "Profile" submenu, but I thought I'd get some feedback first.