Can watching a category watch all its subcategories as well?

The only situation in which I can see that being truly useful is where:

  1. There is a category with a lot of subcategories and
  2. These subcategories are quite dynamic, and added to / moved very frequently

That seems to be a pretty narrow use-case! But one which I just so happen to be considering embarking upon, so I’m delighted :grin:

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Yup, we needed it ourselves for a specific use-case so I left a note here. Glad it might help :slight_smile:

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I can see this in meta.discourse.org, but not in our own instance. I checked and we’re both using 3.2.0.beta2-dev. Do I need to explicitly enable this behaviour in settings?

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Hey Aidan,

You’re right, I see the behavior only on Meta but not on other sites. We’ll do some digging and come back to you.

Hey Aidan,

I can confirm that there’s no setting for this behavior, but it can sometimes be erratic depending on case sensitivity or if there are multiple words in the category name. @JammyDodger and I did some testing to find that it can help if you:

  • Type the full name of the category to make the “+x categories” option appear

  • If your category has multiple words, enter the first word, add a space and then the “+x categories” option should pop up

Does that help? It isn’t ideal, but we can get this fixed once we’ve tracked down all the edge cases here.

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Long thread, not sure what the conclusion is. As of today, a category tracking setting is not propagated to its subcategories. Is it on the roadmap? That would answer a real need.

The functionality is in there, it just is a bit hidden unless you know what you are looking for.

Have a bit of a play around with it (the last couple of posts clarify it a bit)

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I’m not 100% sure it’s working at the minute? I’ve just had a test to check (iPhone/Safari just in case that makes a difference) and it’s not offering me the docs subcategories along with ‘documentation’. Does this work for someone else?

https://meta.discourse.org/my/preferences/tracking

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