Ability to move topics to new categories and suppress notifications

feature
1

Problem

Sometimes communities grow, change, evolve. That seems to be often for my enterprise community. When this happens, sometimes categories are consolidated and we merge the topics.

Unfortunately I’ve noticed that when I move a topic from category A to category B, and there are people subscribed to notifications for “new topics” in category B, they get notified…of all of them. Like for bulk-moving 10 topics, everyone gets 10 notifications.

Solution

Provide an option when bulk-moving (and possibly other operations, like tagging?) to suppress notifications so you aren’t blowing people up with unnecessary notifications.

This is definitely a sore spot because it feels like you’re beholden to a particular structure unless you want to wake up the whole neighborhood to move a wall in your house.

4 Likes
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We have the disable category edit notifications and disable tag edit notifications admin settings that may be useful here?

4 Likes
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I never found that setting while searching—thank you! Are there any other ramifications of disable category edit notifications being on besides my use case mentioned?

1 Like
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I turn ours on temporarily when doing a tidy-up (I also keep the settings tab open in case I wander off and forget about it :slight_smile:). If left on, it also suppresses the notifications from publishing shared drafts, etc so I don’t think it’s desirable to have it on full-time.

There is some work going on for bulk actions at the moment, and I’m hoping there’ll be an additional checkbox or similar in there so you can choose to ninja-move them at that point. (:crossed_fingers:)

5 Likes
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Does it also affect this?

I have a category that gets posted into by an external integration, and that integration also edits its original posts.

Does this setting affect that in any way? Or is there anything I should be doing to ensure people who follow those topics are getting notified of edits?

7

@sp-jordan-violet
for your case, people are not notified for this edit from external integration, right ?

just a thought, for your case, since you have a process that edits the post, is that done in another server ? if so, you could add some logic there, send a personal message (PM) the participants of that topic using discourse API.
I checked the API, the function to add an entry to notification is not exposed tho… but could do PM instead.

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That would be quite inefficient, you’d really just want users to be notified right at the source. But good thinking outside the box!

You also tagged the wrong Jordan :smiley:

1 Like
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I think those two settings only affect category and tag edits and not any changes made to the content of the posts themselves.

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yes, that is kind of a workaround for that case… and when have no access to the server to modify the system… (many are using a hosted instance…)