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I'd like to be able to receive alerts about activity in a thread, but only for players in games I'm in. This is mainly for the "Absences" thread.

That's an interesting request, but I struggle to think of how it'd be useful outside of the Absences thread. I think this may be better addressed by instead considering how we post about absences.

Maybe a profile setting, which alerts all members in that person's games.

You could make a profile setting that just puts some text under a persons name that marks them as absent in all of their posts. Or temporarily overlay their profile picture to have a ribbon denoting that status?

An idea in the past was actually a combination of both those ideas. A ribbon/icon on the user denoting AFS (away from site), an email to the GMs of the games they're in, and maybe a page listing current absences if someone needed to browse through?

Are we talking about a status setting that can be toggled? Setting yourself absent does the above? That would be real useful!

That would be the best approach, I think.