As far as I can tell there is currently no way to set what the default notification settings are for new users. It would be very useful if we could control this as it affects your daily returning visitors (with the default settings, people might forget they posted and only return a week later when they receive a notification).
Which defaults in particular are you looking to change?
Personally I’m only interested in changing how often the digest is send (daily, rather than weekly).
I believe this is a current feature
See also
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problem solved … my work is done 
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Nice I had tried to search for it but apparently not with the right keywords. Thanks!
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I’d like to ask for some more fine grained Admin level / global controls for the defaults of user notifications. We migrated from a Google Group, where everybody got each new post as it was made, unless they opted not to, and we are finding it difficult to get the new community going as they are primarily ‘email’ based users (at the moment - we’re hoping this will change once they get used to Discourse’s web interface and it’s additional features)
I know that there is a global control for Daily/Weekly digest but this is only 10% of the story.
My current client wants:
- all users to automatically be set to Watching a particular category (which an individual user can switch off if they want)
- all users to get a daily digest even if they have been active on the site.
I have managed to fulfil the second one of these by changing the User attribute :email_always for each user directly in the Rails console ( for those interested this is a one-liner, use at your own risk 
User.all.each { |u| u.email_always = true; u.save } ) - this is the equivalent of setting this check box for every user:
To make all users Watch a particular category by is a little less straightforward I think but I can do it, again on the Rails console, using something like User.all.each { |u| CategoryUser.batch_set( u, :watching, 5 ) } where 5 is the category_id in this case, however it’s more tricky than that because this appears to over-write any existing Watching status for another category, meaning that for each user I would have to first query what they were currently watching, then append the new Watching category to this.
If it were accepted as a necessary Admin feature, then I wondered if a good place for this would be on the Invite/Bulk Invite area - when (as an admin) you can auto-add to a Group - OR - possibly on the Groups admin page, where a particular group could be set to a certain notification level for a certain category.
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This thread has a solution, and as I understand it, options for this are on their way to the admin UI
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