# API for Category based notification level update

**URL:** <https://meta.discourse.org/t/api-for-category-based-notification-level-update/72914>\
**Category:** Development\
**Created:** [October 27, 2017, 12:16pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/api-for-category-based-notification-level-update/72914 "2017-10-27T12:16:32Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 1

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**Author:** ![Vaishak\_Kallore](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/vaishak_kallore/32/120380_2.png) [@Vaishak\_Kallore](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Vaishak_Kallore)\
**Post date:** [October 27, 2017, 12:16pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/api-for-category-based-notification-level-update/72914/1 "2017-10-27T12:16:32Z")

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Dear Discourse Team,

I was looking for the API to add certain Categories to user’s Watching/Tracking list, however I could get only ‘_SQL/Launcher_’ based insertion ideas from here.

My purpose is that, we have 50K+ users, who will be assigned to different groups based on their subscription in our non Discourse platform and in the forum we will have different Categories named similar as Group name to make it more meaningful. When a user is created, by default user has 0 notification settings, and they can opt for Category notification from our non Discourse platform.

> [@Make members of a group watch a category by default](https://meta.discourse.org/t/make-members-of-a-group-watch-a-category-by-default/22127):
>
> We have a private category, limited to a particular opt-in group of Discourse members for our organization. Say it’s “staff” – it’s not actually, but it’s along those lines. I want to make sure that all staff receive prompt notifications of discussions in that private category. We encourage them to set their category settings to “watching” but I don’t think many of them have. Under the category’s security settings, when I say “staff can create/reply/see” I’d love it if there were a way to sa…

Or have to install this plugin in order to achieve my purpose.  
[https://github.com/amical/discourse-watch-category](https://github.com/amical/discourse-watch-category)

Then I looked at the network requests happening here, `http://exampleforum.com//u/{username}/preferences/categories`  
On saving the form its doing a _PUT_ method call to `http://exampleforum.com/u/{username}.json`

with following parameters,

```
muted_category_ids[]:-1
watched_category_ids[]:-1
tracked_category_ids[]:-1
watched_first_post_category_ids[]:-1

```

Then I’ve tried the same with API key & API Username, and it worked as expected, I could make a user add/remove watching a group through the API call, with category ID(s); which I got through categories list API. With this option, a user can subscribe to any Categories of his/her choice!!

My worry or question is, **as it is not documented at the moment, will this feature get removed in future? Or will this be documented in the API docs?**

Sorry, if I have duplicated it, couldn’t get a resource with the searches I did. Thank you! 🙂

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