Yeah, you may want to tweak this user preference:
Automatically track topics I enter …
- never
- always
- after 1 minutes
- after 2 minutes
- after 3 minutes
- after 4 minutes
- after 5 minutes
- after 10 minutes
That is what I recommend first. We are adding a way to set topics to “regular” from the topic list soon as well, so you would no longer have to enter the topic to set that state.