Mailing list turned OFF - How to Disable Per Post Email for Existing Users

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AI-generated summary

The discussion revolves around disabling per post email for existing users after turning off “mailing list mode” in a Discourse forum. Senthil initially asks if it’s expected behavior for users who registered when “mailing list mode” was ON to still receive emails for everything. To achieve the desired behavior, Senthil proposes editing user settings in the database and setting category tracking level defaults historically.

fefrei cautions that actively changing settings for all users might go against their manually configured intentions. Instead, fefrei suggests only changing defaults, not touching existing users, and educating them on how to configure their email settings. If changes to user settings are made, fefrei advises reducing the amount of mail users get, such as disabling mailing list mode only for users who still have it on, and then informing users of the changes and how to revert if desired.

1

Hello All,

Our forum grew from few people to few hundreds now and we started getting complaints about too many emails.

I turned off “mailing list mode”.

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But still, users who registered when it was ON, get the email for everything.

  • Is that an expected behavior?

Since our forum has grown and still growing, I want to clean up a bit have a situation where.

For certain categories.

  • Category-1 : I want emails for all posts. I think, the term is Watching
  • Category-2: I want email for new topic. I think, there is an option available.
  • Most Categories: I want no emails to be sent (unless @mentioned), and prefer users coming to site and participating.

I want to set this up, but given 600 users have registered when I had mailing list mode ON, how can do this?

  • Should I go to DB and turn-off the mailing list mode from their profile.
  • Then I could use Watching and Tracking as needed and will be get the desired behavior?

Thanks,
Senthil

2

Trying to answer my own post, any acknowledgements will be helpful.

In order to set the mailing list behavior consistent for all users of the site consistently:

And to selectively set the Watching, Tracking Categories Consistent for all Users.

I plan to do that after taking a backup of my instance.

Is my thinking along the right lines? Am I missing anything?

3

Yes, this is something you’ll do in the Rails console, and the topics you linked to provide good guidance. :+1:

However, before you go on, please consider that you’re actively changing settings for all users, possibly against their (manually configured) intentions. A less intrusive alternative would be to only change the defaults (as you did already, at least for mailing list mode), not touch existing users, and write a post that explains to them how they can configure the amount of mail they get themselves.

If you decide to go ahead with changing user settings, I’d recommend that you make sure that you only reduce the amount of mails that users get. For example, disabling mailing list mode but setting a category to Watching for all users is not safe in this regard: What if the user already disabled mailing list mode intentionally? Instead, I’d recommend that you filter for the list of users that still have mailing list mode on, and only for them disable mailing list mode and watch a category instead. After that, I’d write a post explaining what settings you changed, what that means for your users and how they can revert if they liked the old way. :slight_smile: