Confusing notification settings/Wiki - THREE columns of checkboxes?

Question

Hello, 
 I recently realised that I wasn't receiving notifications that I should have been receiving, so looked for help in the forums. 
 I found the Wiki regarding notifications ( here ) and applied the specified settings. However, I then started receiving notifications for ALL posts in the forums I'm subscribed too!! 
 Having looked again, I've just noticed that there are actually THREE columns of checkboxes in the notification settings (see below). The Wiki doesn't mention anything about the left-hand column of checkboxes. I've just unchecked it in the hope that this will resolve my (new!) issue of receiving too many notifications. 
 Can anyone confirm these settings? (And/or explain why this third column is there in the first place?!) 
 Hayley

Lennert Fransen · Accepted Answer

Hi Hayley, 
 There are indeed multiple different ways to subscribe to forums and threads within a forum. 
 What you did, like you explained above is subscribing to a forum instance which means you get notifications for ALL posts in a single forum. If it's a busy forum you will definitely get annoyed by all the notifications. To check which forums you subscribed to please head to Profile -> Settings and scroll to the bottom of the page and look for all "Yes"ses, like below :

Make sure you un-subscribe from the forums you get too many notifications from. My settings are like the image below, so probably looking at what I explained above would already make a good first step. (so looking at the different forums in groups you are member of) 
 
 Apart from that in the beginning of your post you refer to not getting notifications you should get from some forum posts, could you please explain what notifications you think you're not getting? Then I can try to help you change some settings.

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Confusing notification settings/Wiki - THREE columns of checkboxes?