Automatically set active members to follow a category

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Automatically setting active members to follow a category

The discussion revolves around finding a way to automatically set active members to follow a specific category, rather than relying on Trust Levels. noahl shares the context of their forum, which has a large number of inactive accounts from a previous migration.

JammyDodger suggests creating a custom group for “recent users” and using a SQL badge to determine who meets the criteria. This would be combined with an Automation plugin to add and remove users from the group daily.

The proposed solution involves:

  • Creating a “Recent Users” group that follows the category
  • Running an Automation daily to add/remove users based on the criteria
  • Using a SQL badge to determine if users fit the criteria

Resources mentioned for understanding and implementing this solution include:

1

For a little context:

  • Our forum has ~95K members
  • Around a year ago, we migrated 3 separate forums and combined them into 1
  • We currently have an “Announcement” category which T1, T2, T3 & T4 groups are automatically “Watching first post”
  • Topics in the announcement category can only be made by Admins

At the end of each week, we create a “newsletter” style topic, celebrating community achievements, product releases, upcoming events and more.

Currently, all members within the above Trust Levels are notified when this topic is created. That being said, we’re beginning to evaluate if this is the best way forward.

When we migrated our previous forums, we brought over a lot of inactive accounts.

We’re looking for potential ways for only active members/within a time frame to be “Watching first post” in the category.

For example, instead of all Trust Levels following, we’d have it setup so only accounts that have been active since August 2023 are following.

Any ideas on how to achieve this? Would Data Explorer help us here? Perhaps the Automation plugin?

2

I think it may be possible to create a group of ‘recent users’ that you could apply the Watching First Post criteria to rather than the trust level.

One way could be to create a custom SQL badge that ran daily based on ‘last seen’. This could be set to auto-revoke for anyone who doesn’t meet the criteria. You can then have an Automation to add the users with that badge to the group (and remove them when they lose it).

Does that sound feasible?

3

That seems like it might be a potential solution.

So, to clarify:

  • The “Recent Users” group is the one that is following the category
  • Automation is run daily which adds/removes people from the group according to the criteria
  • A SQL badge determining if they fit within the criteria

Are there any resources available that might help with understanding how this works fully?

4

That’s essentially the gist of it. :+1:

There’s some info on the custom SQL badges in this topic - Creating triggered custom badge queries

I think the query itself will be quite a simple one if you base it on something like ‘seen in the last x months’.

And a walkthrough for the specific Automation here: Add users to groups through custom field automation Nope, scratch that, it’s the wrong one. I thought I’d done one for the badge version too, but now I’m not sure.

There’s a few moving parts to it, so it’d also be worth a test run to make sure everything gels together. :slight_smile: