Lilly
July 9, 2026, 5:27am
7
so, just for kicks - i opened a PR here for making all flag notifications only notify members of the Moderators group (option B, above). thus, Admins who are not members of the Moderators group will not receive any notifications or indicators of flags. They can of course still enter the review queue via the sidebar whenever they wish.
i expect some PR tests to fail as usual, probably linting. lol
my old pal triage-bot can probably fix
main ← Lillinator:flags-notify-mods
closed 05:14PM - 09 Jul 26 UTC
## What is the purpose of this Pull Request?
Currently, Discourse broadcasts re… view queue notifications (flags, queued posts) to the entire `staff` group. This results in significant notification noise for "pure Admins" who are not members of the Moderator group, and thus, not involved in the day-to-day moderation of the community.
Following the discussion on Meta here: https://meta.discourse.org/t/add-setting-to-not-show-flag-notification-to-admins-who-are-not-moderators/383964/5
This PR makes flags only notify the Moderators group instead of staff; thus, Admins not in the moderators group are not notified of flags nor see a review queue count indicator in sidebar (they can still go to the review queue manually as usual). That is, it mutes the active UI elements for pure Admins while preserving their underlying permission to access and action the review queue if they choose to.
### Technical Implementation:
This PR intercepts the reviewable counts at the Model and Serializer layers to securely silence the frontend without modifying underlying database permissions or the core `/review` route.
1. **Websockets & Live Updates:**
* Scoped `notify_users` to `moderators` instead of `staff` to prevent live browser "pops" for admins.
* Updated `publish_reviewable_counts` to push `0` counts to pure admins.
2. **UI Badges & Preloaders:**
* Overrode `unseen_reviewable_count` and `reviewable_count` in `CurrentUserSerializer` to clear the red avatar flag, the blue menu badge, and the sidebar count for pure admins.
* Intercepted `Reviewable.user_menu_list_for` to return an empty array for non-moderators, effectively silencing the `<meta>` tag preloader and the user menu dropdown API.
3. **Tests:** Updated `refresh_users_reviewable_counts_spec` to expect `0` for admin payloads. *(Note: CI is running, will update any other strictly `staff`-scoped spec expectations as needed!)*
### Testing Performed:
Manually verified on a live development install with three distinct user roles:
- [x] **Pure Admin (Admin = true, Moderator = false):** Receives 0 websocket pops, no red avatar badge, no blue menu badge, and an empty menu dropdown. Can still successfully manually navigate to `/review` and action pending flags.
- [x] **Pure Moderator (Admin = false, Moderator = true):** Behavior remains exactly as it was. Fully receives websockets, badges, and dropdown items.
- [x] **Hybrid Staff (Admin = true, Moderator = true):** Behavior remains exactly as it was (receives all notifications).
- [ ] **Category Moderators:** not tested yet.
### Files Touched:
* app/models/reviewable.rb
* app/models/user.rb
* app/serializers/current_user_serializer.rb
* app/controllers/reviewables_controller.rb
* spec/jobs/refresh_users_reviewable_counts_spec.rb
* spec/requests/reviewables_controller_spec.rb
edit: sorry @Moin , i do not care about category moderators
(the PR probably broke some category moderator notifications somewhere but that’s an adventure for another day…)
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