Auto-watch based on group membership

Contribute Feature

AI-generated summary

The discussion revolves around the feature of auto-watching categories based on group membership in Discourse. David_Baker1 suggests implementing this feature, specifically for nonprofit organizations where users are accustomed to receiving notifications for group activities, similar to traditional mailing lists. He argues that this is not spamming in the context of nonprofit membership organizations, where users engage sporadically and need to be alerted for critical actions.

mikechristopher agrees with the idea and points out that it’s not specific to nonprofits, but a broader feature that could benefit various sites. He links to a previous discussion on the topic, which has been raised multiple times but not developed yet.

erlend_sh shares a relevant GitHub link (https://github.com/discourse/discourse-watch-category-mcneel) that was mentioned in the previous discussion, potentially providing a starting point for implementing this feature.

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This is one of those topics meant for the ‘nonprofit’ tag.

It would be helpful if, when creating a new group, we had the option of indicating which categories should be set to ‘Watching’ for any user added to that group.

In the nonprofit membership space most people are most used to traditional mailing lists. They know if they get added to, say, the Finance Committee (group) that they will automatically start getting notices/emails for any activity on that mailing list.

In Discourse (for many good reasons in other cases) this would be seen as spamming. But most of my users engage with a membership nonprofit only sporadically and may go weeks before any activity. So they are not coming to the web forum each day to check things. They need to get these notices so they can act on the activity.

If this can only work if we teach/force them to read this help page and go here to set a Watch etc. then it becomes a distraction/burden and the result will be they miss committee actions and I’m scurrying around trying to manually alert them.

I fully agree with the spamming reality in a traditional web-forum community of strong and connected aficionados. But this is not seen as spamming but critical infrastructure in a nonprofit membership org.

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I would not see this as specific to nonprofit but a potential to a lot of different sites and has been brought up multiple times but not developed yet

See here:

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Buried in that topic you will also find this:

https://github.com/discourse/discourse-watch-category-mcneel

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