Automatically mute/unmute categories based on language preference?

I am a new discourse user and first want to thank everyone on here for having built such an amazing platform. We thought for a long time what would be the best solution for our Forum and I am so happy we went with Discourse. Whenever I think “could we maybe do this” I google it and there is away of doing it in Discourse. It’s amazing, thanks a lot!

Now there is one issue I am trying to solve, but cannot find an answer to yet, so I wanted to ask.

We are an online language school that teaches different languages and users join our forum automatically when they sign up to our website. I want to put users into groups automatically when they sign up depending on the language they study which will then mute categories for languages they dont study (at the moment I do it manually, but we will automize the process)

Later, people might choose to study another language or to study 2 languages at the same time. So they might be switching between groups, maybe leaving the group Chinese and join Japanese instead or join both at the same time.
I am trying to understand how the muting of categories works when people switch or are members of several groups.

So I understand when I join a group that mutes categories for it’s members, these categories turn muted for me. Now my questions are:

  1. If I leave that group, will they be unmuted?
  2. If I remain a member but join another group that has set the same categories set to for example “tracking” will the muted groups be changed to “tracking” or remain muted?
  3. What happens if the user manually unmuted a category and then joins a group that mutes that category. Will it be muted again?
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Hello, just wanted to quickly ask again if anyone has any suggestions on how the muting for categories changes when people leave groups or different groups have conflicting muting rules?

Not sure if I phrased the issue very well above - it is my first support post here, so in case this should go somewhere else or I should ask in a different way, I am very open to improving.
I searched for the answer, but couldnt find anything.

So I spent a bit of time testing this out and want to summarize the results in case they are useful for someone else.

When a user joins and leaves groups with different Category Setting (Mute, Normal, Watch First Post, Tracking, Watching), the category settings of the user will change according to the following rules

“Higher” categories always override lower categories, except that tracking does not override watch first post.
No “Lower” category setting ever overrides a higher setting. So nothing overrides watching. Tracking is only overriden by watching. Watch first post is only overriden by watching (interestingly though, not by tracking). Normal is overriden by watch first post, tracking and watching. Mute is overriden by everything.

In Detail:

  1. Mute is always overriden. If you join a group that mutes a category and you then join a group with any other kind of setting, that category will be changed to the new status
  2. Mute never overrides anything. If you join a group that sets a category setting to anything other than mute and then join a group that mutes that category, the category will not be muted
  3. Watching overrides everything. If you join a group that set a category to a setting and then join another group that set that category to “Watching” the status will always be changed to watching.
  4. Tracking overrides Normal & Mute, but not Watch First Post
  5. Watch First post overrides mute and normal

To override another groups category settings it does not matter if the user is still in the previous group or has left it. The result is the same. The users category settings are always changed from what they were before according to the rules above based to the newest group the user joined.