I was watching a category and then decided to unwatch it. I went to my preferences and removed it from the Watched section and then I saved my preferences. The category no longer showed up in the Watched section of my preferences. Unfortunately I continued to receive emails from the same watched category. When I went into that category under a topic, I saw in the Watching pulldown, that I was indeed, still watching that category. So I selected that pulldown and muted the category. I’m thinking that will now work, but it’s a little confusing when you remove a category from your watched preferences only to find out you’re still watching it.
The work a category preference does can be best described as
When a new topic is created in (foo) category, automatically set its notification state to (bar)
Removing a category preference would not reset all existing topics in (foo) category to a different notification state, it just stops future topics from having their notification state set to (bar).
Mute is perhaps different because it is so extreme, mute means “I hate this category with the fire of a thousand suns, every time you show a topic in this category to me I will kill a kitten.” (I may be exaggerating for effect, but mute at the category level basically means make this whole category stop existing, so vast suppression in the UI.)
This is probably another request for bulk setting of topic data (category, notification state, etc) on a lot of topics at once through the UI. Has come up dozens of times since launch, we need to get to it eventually.
Which reminds me, is there a way for me to view all of the topics that I’m tracking, watching, or muted? One of @sam’s happy new query strings, perhaps? A new view on the user page? Bulk actions would be great, but if I can’t find all of my watching topics in one place, I’m still going to have to hunt around and cherry-pick them.
Although there is a very strong power law in effect here – technically I am tracking thousands of topics here on meta (as I have my profile preferences set to auto-track every new topic created), but it rarely matters since nobody replies to ancient topics they can’t even find.
