I just ran into this problem today. There is an additional, worse problem with this that is not yet mentioned in this topic. If members are watching the category it defaults to, it fires a notification about the topic immediately to them before you are able to change the category. Luckily the message I made into a topic was not confidential.
I like the suggestion to provide an admin setting to choose a different default category - that would be fine. Or have the feature respect the ninja edit window (in our case 10 minutes - long, I know) as though the topic were new, before firing off any notifications.
To replicate:
- set up a test user watching the category this feature defaults to (in our case it’s Community Building for some reason, likely because we disabled uncategorized topics?)
- write a message
- make the message public
- check outbound mail server (in our case mandrill) and see notification