Follow up question.
Is there a way to automatically assign a topic in certain categories to a group?
I didn’t find a way to do that, and the automation plugin only has a “random assign” workflow which doesn’t look useful for what I want.
Yea I think this would need a custom automation script, but i could be wrong. you might be able to use the random assign somehow and run it often. 
you could use the group tracking function too.
note you also get the unassigned nav filter at the top of the category topic view page if you enable Add unassigned filter to category category setting
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You can’t do that out of the box, but you could set it up with a custom automation or small plugin. Another option is to trigger “assign” via API when a topic is created in that category, pointing it to the group.
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I looked into that, but it’s a little beyond me on how to implement it.
ChatGPT suggested:
Option A — Core Webhook → API call (no plugin code)
-
Enable group assignments
In site settings, add your group to assign allowed on groups. This enables assigning topics to that group. -
Create a “Topic event” webhook
Admin → Settings → Webhooks → New.
Event type: Topic; check created.
(Optional) Filter to your tickets category so it only fires there.
Set a secret; save. Discourse sends topic_created payloads with the topic id/url. -
Handle the webhook in Zapier/Make/or your own endpoint
Parse the payload; grab topic.id (and confirm the category if you didn’t filter in step 2).
Call the Assign endpoint to assign the group
Use an Admin API key + username. (General API doc + how to “reverse-engineer” endpoints if not documented.) -
Practical tip: open your browser dev tools on a topic, manually click Assign → your group, and copy the network request (path + params). Use that exact request in your webhook handler. (The Assign UI is part of core now; the controller exposes the same route the UI uses.)
This gives you immediate, deterministic assignments the moment a topic is created in tickets.
And I got lost at step 3.