Our moderators have been complaining that extra notifications get sent out for very minor edits, merges and moves to posts. This is exacerbated by the way we started out using our forum which was to turn on email sending of all notifications for all of our 50+ staff using our forum. This means that, for example, when a post is moved to another topic an email is sent out to 50+ people because it is a new reply to that topic.
We know they will start getting too much email and are starting to encourage them to change their notification preferences, but in the meantime this is a real issue for us.
The feature I am looking for is some sort of âthis is a minor changeâ tickbox like dokuwiki has or a âdo not send notificationsâ tickbox that is only available when doing post moves or merges.
I suggest âthis is a minor editâ option for post edits. That is standard for a lot of text-writing sites I frequent, not just wikis. As for moving and merging, I would have to agree with @codinghorror. Those I think need notifications since they arenât done en masse and constant on the usual forum install except for extreme cases.
Well, to be quite honest, right now thereâs been a bit of a chilling effect because people are overwhelmed by all the email they are getting from discourse, and especially the moderators are anxious to avoid making any more changes than absolutely necessary.
But there are a handful of posts that landed in the wrong places since we launched the forum a month or so ago⌠these need to be organized and moved to new categories, new topics or merged with other existing topics.
One ongoing issue weâre facing is that we have a few mailing list categories, and notably one for all staff to use for starting topics. Many staff want to use just email for starting topics and participating in topics - not logging into the site at all. Many of these new topics then need to be moved to new categories. We also continue to get posts added onto existing topics that are meant to be new topics, because staff use existing email addresses⌠but thatâs another issue.
Changing the category wonât generate an email, only topic merges and splits will â as merges and splits result in posted notifications so you can find your way to the merge or split.
I guess if you are doing some kind of spring cleaning with merging and splitting, do that before turning on the email notifications for everyone?
This makes some sense. So as admin I can go in and deselect âdisable emailsâ and it will not send any messages while I do the spring cleaning? Or moderators, in pinch, can ask me to disable emails before they merge or split a post? Cumbersome, but ok.
We merged some old topics regarding meeting planning, and the notifications that went out caused someone to add something to this weekâs meeting agenda that was several months old because they assumed the notification was from something current â it looked like it was a new reply.
Or maybe add something that describes whatâs really happening, rather than making the email notifications look like a new post/reply?
Iâve had that thought too - when you rely on the site for notifications, you can always see what itâs about. When you rely on email, you just get posts that look new which is a bit confusing.
If this is meant to imply that moving topics will trigger neither emails nor new topic notifications, then this information is outdated. I just moved an old release announcement into the announcement topic (which users are watching by default) and it looks like people were notified (at least I received a notification). So I immediately moved the topic back out of the announcements category, hoping that I would prevent emails from being sent out, but it didnât, even though the emails were sent about 10 minutes after I had moved the topic back again (I just checked the exact times: topic moved out of announcement category: 11:12, user_watching_first_post email sent: 11:26). Is this supposed to happen?
In any case, Iâd like to raise this old question again: is there anyway of moving topics into a different category without triggering notifications? Perhaps there could be a setting for âdonât notify new topics inactive for more than than ⌠daysâ? That way you could move around old (in my case: imported) topics without people getting irrelevant notifications.
My understanding is that when you use the bulk update modal via the admin wrench on topic lists, it does not send notifications. Donât take my word for it though and test it out.
Ah! So youâre saying that it works differently when you move a topic via that method than when you move it by editing the title of the individual topic?
There definitely are differences between bulk actions and normal edits. Last time I checked, bulk actions allowed you to edit tags without recording an edit to the first post.
Okay, I tried it and can confirm that bulk moving topics to a different category that is being first-post-watched by a user, does not trigger notifications for that user. Just to be clear: the emphasis is on bulk. Moving topics the ânormal wayâ does trigger notifications.
I have not tried it with tags, but would assume that the same logic applies.
No, it looks like you are right. Thanks for clarifying.
Edit: Sorry, this isnât over yet. I just saw that at least one user did in fact receive an email for one of the two topics I bulk moved. But I didnât. I canât make any sense of it right now, especially since that user only was notified about one of the teo topics. Possibly it has something to do with either having previously been notified about some of the topics or having already read them, though, in my case this only applies to one of the two topics.
In addition, I noticed that one of our mods recently moved another topic into the same category (and Iâm pretty sure he didnât use bulk move, but will ask him) and nobody was notified at all.
Iâm seeing ânew topicâ and ânew replyâ notifications every time I move topics across categories using the bulk option, for users who have the target category set to âWatchingâ or âWatch first post.â
An option to avoid notifications for category changes would be appreciated.
I just recategorized 60+ old topics (via the bulk admin setting) and hundreds of users received 60+ notification emails. I wish there had been a way to prevent this
to the first post.
