Fresh unlisted topics get emailed to 'watch first post'

Product Support

AI-generated summary

Frully reports what appears to be a bug: when creating a topic marked as ‘unlisted’ from the start, it still triggers email notifications to users watching the first post — even though the intent is to draft content privately before publishing. This behavior undermines the purpose of the ‘unlisted’ toggle, which should prevent public or automated distribution until ready. The user suggests an alternative workflow (using an editors category and moving topics later) but finds it unnecessarily cumbersome. They reference prior discussions on meta.discourse.org showing others have observed similar behavior, including in mailing list mode and for users with ‘send me all’ settings, indicating this may be a systemic issue rather than an isolated case.

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I think this is a bug related to behaviour that others have noted…
Situation: Have global notifications category that only admin/management can post in, set every user to watch first post to ensure emails go out. If I create a topic toggled as unlisted (from topic create, before it’s ever made public), it still sends email notifications. The goal is to have the team wiki the announcement before it’s published per se, but sending it out a rough draft is a bit annoying.

Alternatively we can have an editors category, then have someone move the completed topic to announce, but it seems like extra work for what should be invisible. (If intentional, then it seems to defeat the purpose of having ‘toggle unlisted’ in the topic create menu.

My searches:

https://meta.discourse.org/docs?search=email%20unlisted&topic=51238
How unlisted should work

Someone else noting that mailing list mode sends unlisted

Noting that ‘send me all’ gets further emails after a topic is unlisted.

1 Like
Users notified of unlisted topic creation
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Closed in favour of this Contribute > Feature topic Newly-created "unlisted" Topics send "new topic" Notifications