We saw the same thing happening with a mention in a post from 2016 that was moved to a different category, on a recently imported forum.
I cannot find any recent changes (everything related to these notifications seems at least 11 months old code) but I think it’s too coincidental to see this happening just after this was reported here.
This is absolutely totally unwanted behavior. Especially right after a migration, this should not be peoples first interaction with a Discourse forum.
Why would one want a notification to be sent out if a topic is moved to a different category anyway?
@JammyDodger @maiki is this indeed prevented by disable_category_edit_notifications ? If not, is there a way to backfill the notifications so this won’t happen again?
I don’t think doing these things from the console would prevent notifications from triggering. If you want to circumvent notifications, you would need to do it in the database (and that could have other kinds of unwanted side effects).