It seems like whenever a category is watched, any subcategories underneath it are not automatically watched as well.
This way, when I have a lot of subcategories (in our case different countries), it is quite a long watch list that must be carefully maintained for different users.
Is there a way to “propagate” the watch to subcategories?
This question is similar to:
in
https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-get-notification-of-all-new-topics-of-a-category/4496
but it doesn’t seem to have a resolution yet. Subcategories seem to be only used for:
LatestThis seems relevant:
But anyway, can I get clarity on the intended situation? There no relation between watch settings for categories and subcategories? They each are changed independently, and only posts directly in the top-level category are affected by its watch settings?
Following up on this, I think the solution I’d want is:
Though I can see why selecting the parent separately would be good for some. In our case the there is no posting allowed in the parent category so there is nothing there but the subcategories which there can be many of. Though I would love not have to have to need a bunch of subcategories I think we still need them in some cases.
A way to quickly multi-select in the mute category selection dropdown would be nice too, for those who like fine tuning. but a single option like mentioned above would be great as well
This would be very helpful for our international forum too.
This would be excellent for our forum too, especially if it were also enabled as a default option in the site settings (i.e. in the ‘default categories watching’ setting). It would go some way to addressing various UX issues our users are reporting.
I’ve modified a small plugin I use for similar issues as a personal solution for this as I also need to silence subcategories for language reason.
https://github.com/c-holtermann/discourse-watch-category-jungmedizinerforum/commit/389ad3c2b1c7e2513b0b03775238ef8c5ed2bccd
Thanks for that @Christoph_Holtermann!
I’m no coder, but will pass it on to our resident dev lead to see whether we can make some use of it (we would need to modify it to include subcategories)
There just needs to be an option to “Apply to all sub-categories” when I set the status for a category.
We’re considering changing this behaviour so when a user sets a category as “Watching”, any subcategories underneath it will be watched automatically. This would match the behavior for “Muted” and when needed, users can manually change tracking levels for any subcategory.
I’m wondering if there’s any new feedback here, or if people still agree that it would be useful for their forums going forward.
So, am I understanding right — when Watching is choosed on category then on sub-category level:
As I see this we have here another loose/loose-situation.
But because quite many admin uses sub-categories (and even sub-sub-categories 
) as tags and sub-catgories doon’t have any deeper contextual connect to each others (that situation is true in almost every Discourses I’m following) forcing me following everything instead I may choose is… annoying. Sure — it must be done just once, but still.
On another hand… because category shows content as latest from sub-categories Watching on every sub-category is only logic.
On the NaNoWriMo forums setting all subs to watching when the top category is set to watching would be a nightmare for our users and a performance issue.
The entire reason we have default muting enabled is because the category that contains the sub-categories for our local regions has 700+ subcategories.
The only way I could see this being a reasonable option there would be if there was a way for an admin to choose to disable the auto behavior on the subs for categories that don’t need it.
Seems ideal to me to make it an opt, not an opt-in or opt-out. So, when anyone watches or unwatches a top-level category, prompt them to specify whether to watch/unwatch subcategories. Keep the capacity to have whatever combinations.
Same - I’ve structured our site to take advantage of the ability to have subcats with different default watching than their parents. This is super helpful!
All it needs is an option to include subcats in watching default changes (at any level). I’m talking that for every cat that is a parent, there are two options:
I’m sure I’ve seen this somewhere in the UI for something else, but I can’t for the life of me find where. Was it this way in the past for a while?
I’ve suddenly been able to do it, in all of the Category settings pretty much:
To kick it off, you seem to need to search for the category of interest with text.
It might be nicer for this to also appear in the initial list as it will take a while for folk to stumble across it I think. I couldn’t find it and was looking quite hard!!
Thank you Nathan, that is awesome as it removes the need for any changes. We could make it more discoverable in the future if needed, but at least everyone here now knows this option exists in Discourse.
If anyone wants to test, go here → meta.discourse.org/my/preferences/tracking
The existing feature works great for watching all existing subcategories but in a case where you want a group to track existing and new subcategories, it is possible via Discourse Automation.
I’m not sure I understand. What advantage does this have over the existing group notification settings (which are applied prospectively)?
This automation is a workaround to ensure that all group members are watching future subcategories.
Through existing group notifications settings, I believe clicking the +2 subcategories option would track subcategories that exist today, but you’d have to manually add in future ones later.
