# Bulk editing topic categories should not trigger thousands of email notifications
**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/bulk-editing-topic-categories-should-not-trigger-thousands-of-email-notifications/265269
**Category:** Feature
**Tags:** completed, bulk-actions
**Created:** [May 17, 2023, 2:17am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/bulk-editing-topic-categories-should-not-trigger-thousands-of-email-notifications/265269 "2023-05-17T02:17:40Z")
**Posts on this page:** 14
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@mbauman](https://meta.discourse.org/u/mbauman)
#### Post date: [May 17, 2023, 2:17am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/bulk-editing-topic-categories-should-not-trigger-thousands-of-email-notifications/265269/1 "2023-05-17T02:17:40Z")
I just performed a bulk-edit action on nearly a thousand topics to clean up/re-organize a category slightly. I did not expect this action to send emails (except _maybe_ to the creators of the posts that their posts had been edited), but the users who were watching the destination category were sent nearly a thousand emails each!
Note that this bulk-edit action _did not change_ the topic bump date — even on topics that had no replies. I started with a few topics to confirm that this was the outcome before doing all thousand of them. That’s exactly the behavior I’d want there, and in my naive mental model a refreshed bump date is fairly tightly correlated with an email notification (but obviously that was flawed).
This is an unexpected behavior with a highly consequential outcome. It’d be great if either the UI would make this more obvious or if it simply didn’t happen.
The dialog itself looks fairly innocuous, and the ellipses in the Set Category… button make it look like there will be yet another pane before the action is taken.
Previously: [Any way to NOT send emails when a topic category is changed?](https://meta.discourse.org/t/any-way-to-not-send-emails-when-a-topic-category-is-changed/112845), [Moving old posts triggers email notifications](https://meta.discourse.org/t/moving-old-posts-triggers-email-notifications/208343), both of which seeking workarounds for this behavior (but not directly asking to change it or identifying it as a bug).
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### Author:  [@sam](https://meta.discourse.org/u/sam)
#### Post date: [May 17, 2023, 6:38am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/bulk-editing-topic-categories-should-not-trigger-thousands-of-email-notifications/265269/2 "2023-05-17T06:38:04Z")
So for example?
- Jane is watching `foo`
- You bulk change `bar` to `foo`
- You don’t want Jane to be notified
Vs:
- Jane is watching `foo`
- You change `bar` to `foo`
- You do want Jane to be notified
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### Author:  [@mbauman](https://meta.discourse.org/u/mbauman)
#### Post date: [May 17, 2023, 3:40pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/bulk-editing-topic-categories-should-not-trigger-thousands-of-email-notifications/265269/3 "2023-05-17T15:40:04Z")
I don’t quite understand what you’re asking, but the (default) status quo as I understand it is:
1. Jane is watching new first posts on the category `#foo`.
2. I bulk change 1000 old topics, moving them from `#bar` into `#foo`
3. Jane gets 1000 notifications (emails or dings or badges) that appear “stale” to her — navigating to the `#foo` category doesn’t show any of these topics as actually being new as the topic bump date hasn’t changed.
I would like this behavior to change in one or more ways. I think it’d be helpful if Discourse called out the possibility of lots of notifications during step 2. It’d be even better if it’d be possible to avoid these notifications with a checkbox or some such during step 2. And I think it’d be best if that were simply the default behavior — maybe it’s my lack of imagination, but my gut is that administrators generally want to perform bulk actions without sending bulk notifications. This is very different case from moving a single topic.
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### Author:  [@mattdm](https://meta.discourse.org/u/mattdm)
#### Post date: [May 17, 2023, 4:15pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/bulk-editing-topic-categories-should-not-trigger-thousands-of-email-notifications/265269/4 "2023-05-17T16:15:59Z")
FWIW there are these settings, which I (usually) remember to toggle before and after doing big bulk changes.
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### Author:  [@mbauman](https://meta.discourse.org/u/mbauman)
#### Post date: [May 17, 2023, 8:18pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/bulk-editing-topic-categories-should-not-trigger-thousands-of-email-notifications/265269/5 "2023-05-17T20:18:36Z")
Yeah, I discovered that the “Disable category edit notifications on topics” setting does apparently affect `watching_first_post` notifications after searching here and finding the linked topic above. I wasn’t aware of the setting prior to that, bit even if I was aware of it I think I’d only expect it to affect the topic author’s `edit` notifications based on its wording. It’s definitely helpful to know, but I think the fact that you try to remember to disable it for bulk actions is pretty telling.
I do think it makes sense for a manual (non-bulk action) category edit to trigger a `watching_first_post` notification. And I don’t really mind having the topic author’s get an `edit` notification on a bulk action (there are likely orders of magnitude fewer and they’re much more obvious why they’re happening).
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### Author:  [@sam](https://meta.discourse.org/u/sam)
#### Post date: [May 17, 2023, 10:35pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/bulk-editing-topic-categories-should-not-trigger-thousands-of-email-notifications/265269/6 "2023-05-17T22:35:00Z")
I kind of see this as a feature request:
> You are about to change categories on 1293 topics which will notify 8000 people watching the #new category, Would you like to notify them?
There is also the possible new feature of a “bulk” notification for cases like this that would need to be fleshed out:
> 784 topics changed from categoryA to category you are watching / watching first post.
Does not feel like a bug, but more like a possible improvement we can make.
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### Author:  [@sam](https://meta.discourse.org/u/sam)
#### Post date: [May 17, 2023, 10:36pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/bulk-editing-topic-categories-should-not-trigger-thousands-of-email-notifications/265269/7 "2023-05-17T22:36:24Z")
Also @JammyDodger is this a complete dupe of:
> [@UI Bulk operations & Notifications](https://meta.discourse.org/t/ui-bulk-operations-notifications/137898):
>
> Happy new year everyone tada! I had an issue a couple of days ago - I was going to rearrange the Categories in my recently migrated Forums, and I was using the Bulk operations accessible from the UI (select a bunch of topics, then press the red wrench wrench button). I got this very useful menu: So I set the category for a ton of topics (a few hundreds, one hundred at a time), and behold, my users started getting seriously spammed with notification emails. Luckily I hit a provid…
Should we merge?
Also:
> [@Add a site setting to disable notifications on category changes](https://meta.discourse.org/t/add-a-site-setting-to-disable-notifications-on-category-changes/165814):
>
> Continuing the discussion from [Any way to prevent notifications for post merges, moves?](https://meta.discourse.org/t/any-way-to-prevent-notifications-for-post-merges-moves/23796/18): I keep running into this problem: I select a few old topics I change their category to a more general one The general category is set to Watching First Post by default Every user in my forum gets a new notification for an old topic Last time this happened I got a huge email spike (and a sizeable bill from Mailgun) pensive_face I’ve since learned I can [follow this manual process](https://meta.discourse.org/t/any-way-to-prevent-notifications-for-post-merges-moves/23796/23) to avoid this…
> [@Provide option to disable notifications when post moved, renamed, tagged](https://meta.discourse.org/t/provide-option-to-disable-notifications-when-post-moved-renamed-tagged/26027):
>
> I have started getting a bunch of notifications about older topics I’ve been involved in on meta because @riking is graciously improving their titles, moving them to new categories, adding/removing tags etc. I really appreciate him doing this and do think it’s important for moderators to feel free to make improvements like this. It’s all part of the gardening involved in running great forums. But I don’t see why I should be notified. The same is true on my own discourse sites of course. The fea…
(I love related topics)
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### Author:  [@mattdm](https://meta.discourse.org/u/mattdm)
#### Post date: [May 17, 2023, 11:17pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/bulk-editing-topic-categories-should-not-trigger-thousands-of-email-notifications/265269/8 "2023-05-17T23:17:06Z")
There is also a setting `disable system edit notifications`, which _"Disables edit notifications by the system user when ‘download\_remote\_images\_to\_local’ is active“_.
I assume this is so that, when posts get automatically re-written to use local upload URLs, it isn’t annoying. (Can someone confirm?) But it also seems to mean that you can make “silent” changes via the API if you use the system user…
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### Author:  [@JammyDodger](https://meta.discourse.org/u/JammyDodger)
#### Post date: [May 18, 2023, 4:55am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/bulk-editing-topic-categories-should-not-trigger-thousands-of-email-notifications/265269/9 "2023-05-18T04:55:03Z")
It does seem like this has cropped up a few times. I think there’s this one too which also makes a point about the re-notifying of people who were @mentioned in the original:
> [@Yikes. Hundreds of PMs sent after category change](https://meta.discourse.org/t/yikes-hundreds-of-pms-sent-after-category-change/240515):
>
> So, we’re doing some house cleaning on the forum, and I just moved a few hundred posts into a new category. It was going well until … Dozens of users have now reported getting re-sent private messages dating all the way back to 2015. And because I was the one who initiated the change, it looks like the personal message was sent from my username. Should we have been aware of this?
Let me see if I can tidy these up. 👍
(I opted for a ‘close and redirect’ as a merge seemed like it could get messy)
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### Author:  [@mbauman](https://meta.discourse.org/u/mbauman)
#### Post date: [May 18, 2023, 3:37pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/bulk-editing-topic-categories-should-not-trigger-thousands-of-email-notifications/265269/10 "2023-05-18T15:37:26Z")
I did search for threads like these and found a few, but goodness there are a lot. This just isn’t working how many folks expect. My expectations here were pretty much in line with this sentiment:
> [@Provide option to disable notifications when post moved, renamed, tagged](https://meta.discourse.org/t/provide-option-to-disable-notifications-when-post-moved-renamed-tagged/26027/7):
>
> we have the bulk edit option - when you use that to move, rename or tag, which you can use on just one topic, you do not bump or trigger notifications.
But that’s not accurate. It’s true that bulk edits don’t bump topics, but they do trigger notifications.
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### Author:  [@mcwumbly](https://meta.discourse.org/u/mcwumbly)
#### Post date: [May 19, 2023, 1:56am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/bulk-editing-topic-categories-should-not-trigger-thousands-of-email-notifications/265269/11 "2023-05-19T01:56:52Z")
> [@sam](#):
>
> I kind of see this as a feature request:
>
> > You are about to change categories on 1293 topics which will notify 8000 people watching the #new::tag category, Would you like to notify them?
We have some limits in place elsewhere like maximum mentions that just provide informative feedback along the lines of “you’ve exceeded the maximum number of mentions so no one will be notified.”
Maybe that’s what we do here? Set some maximum bulk size for notifications and show that in a non-obtrusive way when it’s exceeded?
We could pick a reasonable default between 5 and 20. Sites that never want bulk actions to notify could set it to 0 and sites that always want to notify can set it to a very large number.
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### Author:  [@mbauman](https://meta.discourse.org/u/mbauman)
#### Post date: [July 30, 2025, 1:54pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/bulk-editing-topic-categories-should-not-trigger-thousands-of-email-notifications/265269/12 "2025-07-30T13:54:37Z")
Oh amazing, did this get addressed? I now see a new checkbox on the bulk “Update Category” modal!
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### Author:  [@Moin](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Moin)
#### Post date: [July 30, 2025, 4:26pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/bulk-editing-topic-categories-should-not-trigger-thousands-of-email-notifications/265269/13 "2025-07-30T16:26:46Z")
It was added in this commit
[https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commit/7a099ebb6a4c4f177cd416414914d8f902558e90](https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commit/7a099ebb6a4c4f177cd416414914d8f902558e90)
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### Author:  [@mcwumbly](https://meta.discourse.org/u/mcwumbly)
#### Post date: [July 31, 2025, 4:27pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/bulk-editing-topic-categories-should-not-trigger-thousands-of-email-notifications/265269/14 "2025-07-31T16:27:08Z")
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