Follow a search and manage your updates

Your task

Ask CityScroll to email you when new public records match criteria you have already checked, and be able to change or stop that afterwards.

Before you start

• Open Following.
• You need an email address at the point you create the watch, and nothing before that. There is no password and no account to set up.
• Decide what you want watched first. The easiest way is to narrow a collection until it shows what you want, then bring those criteria here.

Step 1 — Choose what and where

The page asks two questions in order — What do you want to follow? and Where? — as rows of choices. Pick a topic — Contracts and RFPs, Zoning, Property, Rules or Hearings and meetings, with the rest under More topics — and then a borough, or Any place.

Under Narrow it down you can add a keyword, an agency, and, for some topics, a district or a board. The line under the choices says what happens next in plain words: choosing a topic or a place does not start a watch.

Checkpoint: your choices are selected, and nothing has asked you for an email address.

Step 2 — Preview the matching records

Press Preview matches.

The page now shows the watch it would create, in order. A Watch summary states the rule as a plain sentence beginning "Notify me when…", so you can check the rule in words before agreeing to it. A Watch criteria panel lists exactly what you chose. A Preview section gives the number of matching records and the most recent of them.

A preview is a look at the current records. It is not a subscription, nothing has been saved, and no email will arrive because of it. You can change a choice and press Update matches as often as you like.

If the criteria match nothing right now, the preview says No matches now — still watch for new. That is worth knowing rather than working around: a watch on a quiet topic is a perfectly good watch, because its job is to tell you about records that do not exist yet. An empty preview is only a problem if you expected today's records to be there — in which case widen a criterion and preview again before saving.

Checkpoint: you have read the "Notify me when…" sentence and it describes what you actually want.

Step 3 — Choose how often, then create the watch

Under Email frequency, choose Daily or Weekly. Daily sends on days when there are matches; Weekly sends a digest on Monday.

Then, under Create this watch, enter your email address and press Create watch.

That single step is the whole enrollment. The watch exists as soon as you submit it — there is no confirmation email to click before it starts working. What arrives instead is a welcome message that carries the links you will use later to manage or stop it, so keep it.

CityScroll is not the city's own account system, and following a search here neither creates nor uses an account with the City Record. Whatever rules a city site applies to its own logins do not apply to this.

Checkpoint: the page confirms the watch was created and tells you that you can manage or unsubscribe at any time.

Step 4 — Change, pause, or stop it later

Every email CityScroll sends you carries a manage link. Open that link and you get your list of watches, with, for each one, the ability to change how often it emails, pause it, restart it, or delete it — and one action that removes all of them at once.

Two timings differ, and the pages say which is which. An edit — a new frequency, a pause, a deleted watch — applies to the next digest, sent around 9am Eastern. Unsubscribing takes effect immediately.

If a daily watch has nothing to report for fourteen days, CityScroll sends a short note saying it is still watching, so a quiet stretch never looks like something broken.

Checkpoint: your watch list shows the change you made, and the page tells you when it takes effect.

When the page does not recognize you

The manage pages work from the link in your email. Your browser is never asked to remember who you are, which leaves two states worth telling apart.

• On Following, under Your watches, a browser that has not been recognized is told to open a CityScroll email to see its watches. Nothing is missing and nothing was lost — the page simply has no way to know who you are, so it shows you no one's watches rather than a guess.
• On the manage page itself, an old or altered link is refused with a message saying the link is invalid or has expired, and asking you to use the link in a recent CityScroll email. Manage links are deliberately time-limited. The fix is always a newer email, never a retry.

A third state is neither of those. If the page says it could not load your saved watches, or that the quick preview is not ready, nothing is missing and nothing has been lost — the page could not reach what it needed just then. Both offer a retry, and the answer after a retry is the one to believe.

If you no longer have any CityScroll email, the reliable way back is to unsubscribe from any message you do still have; failing that, create the watch again and use the fresh welcome message as your way in.

One more state to recognize — if you arrive on Following through a link that has been truncated or edited, the page says the watch link is not recognized and that nothing was saved. It is telling the truth: start again from a topic or a record rather than trusting a half-loaded set of criteria.

You are done when

You have a watch you created after reading its rule sentence, an email in your inbox with a manage link in it, and a clear idea of which page changes what — Following creates and previews, the manage link edits and stops.