I believe the main issue here is the nature of the replies being posted. People subscribe to a forum discussion or idea to stay informed and engage in meaningful conversations. However, they don’t subscribe to receive notifications for replies that add no value to the discussion.

A few years ago, there was a trend where users would post simple responses like "Thank you" or "+1." Once one person did it, many others followed suit, resulting in an overwhelming number of unnecessary emails flooding inboxes. While not everyone engaged in this behaviour, some users consistently posted these types of replies, seemingly to collect community points.

As a result, forum moderators began removing such replies from threads. Since then, this unwanted behaviour has significantly decreased, as people realized that these types of responses would be deleted.

Community members are encouraged to participate in discussions by contributing thoughtful insights, suggestions, or feedback. If you want to show appreciation for a post without adding further discussion, please use the "Like" or "Thumbs Up" button instead.

Your idea isn’t bad—moderators have already requested that OutSystems allow us to close discussions on ideas when a thread becomes cluttered with off-topic or non-substantive replies.

Totally agree. I created this idea that goes in this direction and would probably solve our problems.

In short, there would be an option to only follow the status change of an idea, so we would only get notified in something actually changes.

This would be a simple, easy to implement approach. A more robust approach would be something like what the chromium team does, allowing multiple notification settings:

Perfect, @Tiago Ribeiro, that's exactly it.