Bulk topic unsubscribe

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AI-generated summary

A user is receiving a large amount of email notifications from a Discourse forum due to having a high subscription level set for thousands of topics in one category. mbajur is unsure how this happened, as it seems impossible to subscribe to each topic individually through the Discourse UI. codinghorror suggests logging in as the user and resetting the category notification level, but mbajur has already tried this.

codinghorror recommends executing a Rails command to reset the user’s notifications, and wonders if other users may be affected by the forum’s migration from phpBB3. codinghorror confirms that the user has a “watching” notification level set on thousands of topics.

sam suggests that the user may be able to resolve the issue by unsubscribing from one of the notifications and following the prompts to stop watching the category. naveedahmada036 reports a similar issue and shares a related post: https://meta.discourse.org/t/notification-email-for-all-posts-on-topic-to-users-who-even-arent-tracking-the-topic/49802.

1

Hello there

One of my users reported me today that he’s receiveing a huge amount of mail notifications from our discourse forum. I signed-in on his account and checked what’s up - it turned out that he has a highest subscribtion level set for all topics in one of our categories. He could obviously click them one by one and change the subscription level but…tht category has a dozen or so thousands of topics in it so that would be pretty painfull.

  1. How is that possible that he has subscribed all topics just like that? Is that doable by discourse UI? I asked him if he done anything related to topic subscribing recently and he said no. But, who knows :wink:
  2. Am i able to unsubscribe him somehow through admin panel or anywhere else? I’m a pretty fresh discourse admin and there is a possibility i just can’t find some button for that.

As a tip: my forum was migrated from phpBB3, maybe there was some glitch in migration script?

Thanks in advance

2

As a first step, log in as this user, go to the category, and set the category notification level back to “normal”.

3

It’s already set like that :wink: It kind of looks like he has changed the subscription level for each topic one by one. Which is impossible imho.

4

You will need to execute a command at the Rails command line to reset all his notifications. Perhaps @techapj can assist with the details?

Are you sure no other users have this problem, perhaps as a result of the migration?

5

It’s pretty hard to say. Just one guy reported it so far but i can’t really check it anyhow.

6

Just to clarify, because the language is important here: this user has watching notification level set on thousands of topics?

7

Yup, exactly, that’s the case.

8

This sounds like a bug somewhere.

Have the user click “unsubscribe” on one of the notifications and then they will have a screen that will hint them to stop watching the category.

If the issue is persisting, via user prefs

  1. Add category to watching → Save
  2. Remove category from watching → Save
9

I’m facing the somewhat same issue