Watching category mandatory

[pkoevesdi]

Is there any permission setting somewhere, where I can disallow unwatching certain categories? We want a special category, in which first posts should be “must-reads” for certain groups. I know, I can put groups back in there before posting, but I’d like to disallow them to opt-out.

[ondrej]

Welcome to Meta @pkoevesdi

It isn’t possible to force users to un-watch a category easily out of the box.

If you wanted to ‘force’ all users to watch a category there is the default categories watching site setting. If you wanted to ‘force’ all users in a group there is discourse.example.com/g/your-group-name/manage/categories and you can change what categories you want those group members to watch.

However, members could change these whenever so if you wanted to ensure they always watched the correct categories you would have to keep going back to those settings and changing them to reset the users watched preferences and make them follow the category again.

Another way is to hide the watching, tracking, normal etc… buttons on the site and hiding the preferences/tracking user preferences using CSS. There is a guide on how you can customise your site below

Make CSS changes on Your Site

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However, a caveat is that any computer savvy user can bypass such customisations if they wanted for example the use of safe mode.

[pkoevesdi]

Thank You very much! I’d go with the “make them follow the category again”.

[Moin]

@pkoevesdi

We want a special category, in which first posts should be “must-reads” for certain groups.

You could use Discourse Policy. Then users would also receive reminders untill they click the button.

[pkoevesdi]

Thanks. But we don’t want new users to must-read old posts, we want old users to must-read new posts. And we don’t want to make them confirm these.
Up to now, we have a mailing list and send important messages to that list. Now we move to discourse and still want to make sure, certain messages (= first posts) are delivered to their E-Mail-Account.

But as looking further down, that use case might be possible with tht plugin. I’ll take a closer look.

[Moin]

@pkoevesdi

Now we move to discourse and still want to make sure, certain messages (= first posts) are delivered to their E-Mail-Account.

Then forcing the users to watch the category is not sufficient since they can also disable receiving emails in their preferences.

my/preferences/emails

Email me when I am quoted, replied to, my @username is mentioned, or when there is new activity in my watched categories, tags or topics

So you would have to ensure no one changes that as well.

[bloomexperiment (Tracey)]

quote=“Pkoevesdi, post:5, topic:313246, username:pkoevesdi”]
we want old users to must-read new posts. And we don’t want to make them confirm these.
Up to now, we have a mailing list and send important messages to that list. Now we move to discourse and still want to make sure, certain messages (= first posts) are delivered to their E-Mail-Account.
[/quote]

For important notices that you want to reach everyone’s mailboxes, I think you could try to send out a PM to @trust_level_0, if you set that group to allow receiving PMs – but I’m not too sure. Though people may not receive it in their emails if they turn off email notifications.

If you want to allow public replies, you could make an accompanying public topic.

[pkoevesdi]

Ups, thanks for pointing this out. So, actually, there’s no way at all of sending a E-Mail to all users? They always have the upper hand in terms of getting Mails from discourse? That’s sad.