In a support discussion titled “Can I receive the notifications that would normally go to another user?”, noahl asks if it’s possible to redirect future notifications from a departing team member’s account to a new profile, while preserving their existing contributions. twofoursixeight suggests setting the new profile to “Watching” mode for relevant categories, though it may not fully meet the need. mcwumbly clarifies there’s no built-in feature for this, but proposes creative workarounds: taking control of the departing user’s email and forwarding Discourse notifications to a team inbox, or using Discourse Automation to pipe notifications into a team chat channel. tobiaseigen adds that plus addressing (e.g., you+username@yourcompany.com) could work if “Normalize emails” is disabled, and raises a concern about whether inactive users eventually stop receiving notifications — a behavior that may be configurable but isn’t clearly documented. The thread explores practical, non-native solutions to ensure continuity of engagement without losing historical context.
One of our team is moving on to a new opportunity at a new company.
We want to leave their profile ‘as is’ within the forum as they’ve contributed to a lot of discussions - that said, we want to make sure that any replies they might get on current and ongoing conversations don’t go unnoticed.
Is it possible to assign a new profile to receive any and all of their future notifications? Any other creative solutions to this use case?
I’m not sure but on that new profile, try setting notification preferences to Watching: You will automatically watch all topics in these categories. You will be notified of all new posts and topics, and a count of new posts will also appear next to the topic.
I am not sure this is what you need but I hope it works.
There’s no built in feature to do exactly what you’re asking for here, so let’s first explore “creative solutions” territory.
First, a question about this:
Are you hoping to allow them to continue participating in the community using the same account? Or will it be required that they create a new account if they wish to do so?
If you’ll be “owning” their existing account and require them to create a new one, then you control the email associated with the account. In that case, one approach here is to use an email based strategy – you could change the email address associated with their account to one you control and have email notifications from Discourse forwarded to a group that is responsible for your community.
I can imagine other similar creative solutions, but would need to tinker or explore more to validate whether they are doable today – for example, using Discourse Automation to pipe things into a chat channel your team can see, or something like that.
Great idea! You could also use plus addressing using your own email address if your email provider supports it (e.g. you+username@yourcompany.com). Requires Normalize emails to be disabled.
One wondering is whether members will eventually stop getting notifications if they stop logging in? I don’t recall how long that takes and if there is a setting to control it, but I believe we do stop emailing people eventually.