I’m not getting consistent behavior so tomorrow I’ll go on try.discourse.org and control for the first two variables:
Different web browsers?
Different site settings?
Admin account vs non-staff TL1 user?
Here’s two examples that are different:
Admin on Firefox at this site = unread topics still appear but the sub-category (wordpress) is suppressed. in the Support category and the first topic is from that sub-category:
Non-admin on Chrome at private site = sub-category (Connect) is not suppressed as expected but the topic is suppressed - see the 1 new topic indicator:
FYI, the mobile issue that I had was simply due to caching. To avoid that I simply restarted the Discourse app each time I changed the preferences.
Hi again
I found time to fully test this and I found that the sub-category muting is working as expected.
I can’t reproduce this so your next step if you still have this problem is to post some actual screen shots of the muted subcategory setting and the category view where the muted sub-category topics are visible.
How I tested this
I can’t show you it sub-category muting working correctly on try.discourse.org because it has no sub-categories. So I used my own private instance which is why I had to redact identifiable info.
I couldn’t get the topics in the muted sub-category to display in the category. I had to enter the muted sub-category to see its topics.
Category doesn’t show the muted sub-category and doesn’t show its topics
If I view the category that contains the muted subcategory then I can’t see any of the topics for the muted subcategory. But I can see the unmuted sub-category called “Connect” so the “Test topic” appears.
I could see that topic in the Latest | Categories view but I cannot see “Test topic 2” or “Test topic 3” which are in the muted subcategory called “Create”:
Sub-category view of muted sub-category does show the topics
If I view the muted subcategory called Create then I can see all the topics it contains. Obviously, there has to be some way to access those topics which is why they become visible in the specific sub-category.
My understanding is that they are muted from things like latest, but if you visit the category you can find them. If you want never to see them you would need to unlist them.
If they didn’t show when you visited the category how would you ever see them?
If I understand this is to be expected, I don’t understand why the topics of the muted category appear in the parent category in the Category view - see 1. image.
I think this topic has got away from the original topic of mailing list mode notifications. The solution to stop notifications involved two methods. The preferred method is basically decided by which is the smallest proportion of categories:
only watching categories you want to see notifications for
muting categories you don’t want to see notifications for
That’s why I tested the Latest | Categories view which doesn’t show topics from the muted subcategory. This worked as expected.
But know we’re talking about a different issue. I didn’t test the Categories view because, AFAIK, it doesn’t have a relationship with mailing list mode notifications.
Which is why I think that this issue should be moved to a new topic.
I have two thoughts here. Neither is a complete design, but hopefully they are helpful.
Note: the complexity here is in relationships between the types of notifications. Imagine removing all settings except these (shown in topics, sub-categories, categories, and globally):
Notifications: Inherit | All posts | First post | Mentions+replies | Never
Tracking: Inherit | All posts | First post | Mentions+replies | Never
Emails: Inherit | All posts | First post | Mentions+replies | Never
Global wouldn’t have “inherit”, since it’s the top level.
Topics wouldn’t have “first post”, since it can’t apply retroactively.
Reducing the number of settings — for example, by merging “tracking” and “notifications” into one continuum — makes notifications quicker to configure, but doesn’t necessarily make them simpler when you also have to consider their relationship to email settings.
⇒ If/when you switch to per-category mailing list mode, the simplifications / relationships you have now may not be the ones you want to stick with.
This is what brought me here. To me, “mailing list mode” (as compared to “send me emails for every notification”) means that I am taking responsibility for managing notifications (in my email) — discourse should assume that I have read every post that is emailed to me. For categories with mailing list mode on, I should never receive unread notifications (I would still appreciate receiving notifications which are automatically marked as read).
I wouldn’t mind the mailing list mode sending me all unmuted categories by default if it was very easy to mute a category with one or two clicks. Those of us who want to primarily use the email interface find it very clunky to manually go to the web interface, then select our icon, then the person icon, then Preferences, then categories, then find the category we want to mute in the Muted area and select it. This would be so much easier if the unsubscribe button at the bottom of each email had additional options to mute the subcategory or whole category. I may have missed it but I have searched and haven’t found anyone discussing this possibility before. What do others think of this simple idea?
You can also just select the bell icon to change your notification prefs per category, tag or topic. You don’t have to do it via your user prefs.
As for a mute button on emails… try selecting the unsubscribe button at the bottom of emails sometime. It will give you some options including “stop watching this topic” and “Stop watching all topics in …” which means you will get less email.
I didn’t notice the bell icon, that’s good to know. However, I only see topic on the bell icon:
How do you get category?
With mailing list mode enabled and not watching a particular category, it does not offer me an option of unsubscribing the category, that’s my point. It won’t let me post a second image as a new user, but the options it offers are:
I see, that is easier. So instead of clicking unsubscribe, I click “Visit topic” then select the category at the top of the page then the bell icon and muted. 4 clicks instead of the 2 I hoped for, but still a lot easier than going via the user preferences and searching for the category.
After mulling this over for a while — as someone who uses mailing list mode, I have a concrete suggestion:
Move mailing list mode to the top of the Email category and rename the header to Notification Emails.
Move “Include an excerpt of replied to post in emails” directly below it.
Turn it into a 3-way drop-down:
Never send me emails for notifications
Hides all settings except activity summary.
Send me emails when I receive notifications
Works like it does now.
Send me emails INSTEAD of notifications (mailing list mode)
Replaces the “Include an excerpt of replied to post in emails” setting with the “Send me emails about my own posts” one.
Shows text explaining that:
The full content of the post will be included in the email.
Both the notification and the post itself will be automatically marked as read.
Now, I can control mailing list mode on a per-category basis just by adjusting my watching settings for that category, the same as I currently can for notifications. It does not add additional settings and there’s not much increase in complexity. And it provides an easy toggle for switching all notification emails off, for folks who don’t want them at all.
I actually think the original goal of allowing migration from pure mailing lists would not work with what @smichel17 is suggesting, because this makes the mailing list settings dependend on “watched” state. What I was seeking was a setting that would be maling list “per category”, while also allowing normal usage of the rest of the forum.
Our situation is that we have a new Discourse forum that is to thriving, but that is only used by a more active part of our community members. Then we have a legacy Mailman instance where almost all members are. This Mailman instance is geographically based (each chapter of our organization has one mailing list that they use a few times a month to arrange meetings and this is multilayer).
Ideally, we would recreate the geographical structure from Mailman in Discourse and set those categories to mailing list mode. That would mean the existing passive users would still have the same access to information, but our IT overhead would be lowered (no more Mailman), plus it would make it easier for users to become more involved in the Discourse forum itself.
However, if I understand it this is currently impossible to implement in Discourse, or am I misreading this thread?
