Someone replied to a topic you are Watching

Support
1

This annoying prefix is new since recent updates. How do I get rid of it? My users dislike it intensely. It only just started happening along with other recent turbulence such as mail not going out.

I am unbale to figure out what template needs to be edited. Where does this preview stuff come from?

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What do you mean? What prefix?

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I think it is about this commit maybe?

And prefix = preview, I think

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I think you can customize the individual preview texts as was suggested in Change in behaviour re mail - #11 by supermathie.
You can find more about editing texts in Customize text in Discourse

So, for example, to prevent “Someone replied to a topic you are Watching,” you would remove the site text in user_notifications.user_posted.preview. You cannot leave it empty, but you can use an invisible character like ㅤ.

You can see the difference here:

Screenshot_20260119_123546_Gmail
Screenshot_20260119_123546_Gmail1164Ă—375 107 KB

You can do the same with all the other preview texts.

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That’s very strange. The point of the change, as I see it, is to give people more info about why the message landed in their inbox. Funny that knowing that is something people would feel “intense” about. People just hate change.

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The problem is not that information has been added. The problem is that by merely occupying part of the limited screen space available for message previews, the text takes away useful information that was there before - specifically, a line of text from the body of the message.

I pre-filter Discourse messages into a dedicated maibox, so I already know why the messages got there. I now see this new text in the preview of every message in that mailbox instead of text that actually previews the message. It’s not useful to me, and displaces something that is.

It also seems that this text appears for the first message of a new topic. In that case it simply isn’t true - the message isn’t a reply to anything.

Martyn

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Oh. I’m convinced. That does seem terrible. You can customize that text, though (probably that was mentioned above and I’m too lazy to look back?). Maybe just “watching” or an eyeball emoji?

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I’m not the admin of the Discourse server though, and in any case for all I know other users might like it. I can’t see anything to change it in my personal preferences.

Martyn

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Then my solution doesn’t help!

Sorry

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Just tagging onto this topic to say that our community’s users aren’t liking it either. Where the preview used to give them useful information, now it’s become meaningless.

-Brad

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If you’re an admin you can change the text as i suggested.

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I’m an admin of our Discourse instance, but not of our server (we’re an open-source project, benefitting from Discourse hosting our forums), so don’t believe I can make the change you suggested?

I’ve spent time today trying to improve things using the instructions provided by @Ethsim2 in:

but have been coming up short (I’d comment there, but that thread is closed). Specifically:

  • I tried removing %{header_instructions} from key templates (e.g., “User Mentioned”, “User Watching First Post”, “User Watching Category or Tag”) as suggested, but it didn’t seem to have any effect. Mails received after that point in OWA still just showed “Someone replied to a topic you are Watching” as their preview rather than a snippet of the message body.
  • In addition, with that change, the subject lines of our mails changed from “%{topic_title}” to “[%{email_prefix}] %{topic_title}” despite the fact that I didn’t touch the templates’ subject line boxes, just the bodies.

As @m1maj has said, I (and my users) feel baffled as to why OWA previews have gone from being a useful preview of the mail body to a boilerplate piece of text that overrides the actual message content and is sometimes inaccurate (e.g., showing up in mails that are first posts in a new topic in a watched category rather than being replies to a watched topic).

-Brad

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You can change site texts from within the interface; you don’t need access to the server for that. My example was done on a forum that is hosted by Discourse too.

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@Moin : Aha, thanks for correcting my misunderstanding! Something I’d read on these threads, combined with my own failure to find the right settings the first time, led to my thinking that this wouldn’t work for Discourse-managed sites. But you’re right that it does.

For others like me who have admin privileges on their Discourse and may need a helping hand, here’s the approach in a nutshell:

  1. Click on the triple-bar menu in the upper right near your user icon and select “configure details”
  2. Scroll down until you see “Site texts” on the left sidebar. For me, it’s the last item in the “Appearance” section
  3. At this point you should see a “Site texts” page that starts with a search bar. Type .preview into that search bar:
    image
    image1162Ă—266 9.39 KB
  4. Among other things, this should filter down to entries like “user_notifications.user_quoted.preview”, “user_notifications.user_posted.preview”, " user_notifications.user_replied.preview", “user_notifications.user_mentioned.preview”, which are the main cases that were annoying our users. Click on the “Edit” buttons of any you’d like to change.
  5. As @Moin says on the linked issue above, these can’t be left blank or simply replaced with a space, but they can be set to a non-breaking space, like ’ '.
  6. This will cause the old preview text to be replaced by the new text. In the case of a non-breaking space like the one above, this should restore most of the previous preview text from the body of the message itself.

Thanks again, @Moin!
-Brad

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