This How-To could have been titled “How not to look clueless in an Open edX meeting” 
During one of those recent meetings, which was about the Build/Test/Release Group, I realised that I wasn’t aware of many conversations that had been happening in the forums. This was all the more embarrassing that I am supposed to be in charge of this working group…
There is one simple solution to that problem: 
notifications!
In every topic category, in the top-right corner, there is a 
bell icon: clicking it will allow you to define which events should trigger a notification. Try it out now with the Community category.
For instance, after that particular incident, I enabled notifications for all new messages (both new topics and answers) in the BTR working group category:
This is the “Watching” level.
It is also strongly recommended to receive notifications from the Annoucement category. There, I am “Watching first post”, which means that I get a notification every time a new topic is created, but not for topic replies. It’s important to receive notifications for stuff that matters, but it’s even more important to be able to filter out irrelevant information.
Other notifications preferences can be found in your personal settings. To view your preferences: click your avatar in the top right corner 
click cog 
click “Preferences”. Then, in the left menu go to “Notifications”. Here are my personal settings:
Notice that I enabled the “Allow other users to send me personal messages” checkbox, which was not enabled by default.
Then, you need to decide how you want to receive those notifications. To do that, go to the “Emails” menu:
Nothing fancy here – notice how the default preferences are such that we only receive emails when we are not actually connected to the forums.
Aaaaaand that’s about it! Did I miss anything? How do you configure your notifications? Let me know in the comments 