Sorry if this has already been done; I tried searching and couldn't find anything.
If topics exist independently from their boards, which are just aggregators of topics, shouldn't it be possible to auto-generate boards that include topics based on some kind of criteria?
Ideas include:
This is a good idea, and it's the kind of thing that I'm looking forward to working on.
We've been thinking about this in terms of "feeds" and "tags". The simplest example is a personal feed that only has conversations that you're subscribed to.
There are a couple different things that tags could do.
You could tag by workflow or type of discussion -- for example, articles for deletion discussions -- and then people can see boards that aggregate those those discussion types.
You could also tag by category (the talk page of every article in Category:Ornamental trees) or by WikiProject.
We still have a couple more big, boring pieces to build before we get to the cool stuff like tags and feeds, but I can see them coming, just over the horizon...
If a user is mentioned it could be nice to get an entry on the users local board. Now I get an alert in the notification center, but if I close that the link is gone.
This is very close to turning a Flow-board into an information feed, aka T103083: Explore ideas for information feeds.