In this support discussion, watchmanmonitor confirms whether it’s safe to set default watch settings for categories that some users may not have permission to view. zogstrip clarifies that users without permission won’t even see those categories in their watch list, so no harm or unwanted emails occur. sam further confirms that notifications are guarded by a permission check: Guardian.new(user).can_see?(post) — users who can’t see a post won’t receive notifications or emails. The group also discusses edge cases, such as users being added to groups after account creation — if they save their profile before being added to the group, they won’t inherit the group’s default watched categories sam. watchmanmonitor expresses enthusiasm for using default watch settings across all categories to improve user experience, noting the convenience of “unwatch this topic” links in emails. They also reference a related feature request to auto-watch categories when users are added to specific groups watchmanmonitor, which would streamline permissions and notifications. Overall, the consensus is that setting broad default watches is safe and useful, as the system automatically filters out inaccessible content from notifications and user interfaces.
So, now that this feature is in place, I want to make sure new users are watching all the right categories. The concern is that they won’t all have permissions to all categories.
I want to confirm my assumption, that it’s OK to set a forum’s defaults to include all the important categories, and that if a user can’t see the category, the fact they Watch it by default won’t hurt anything (and won’t generate emails to them from the categories.)
Just checked and if you put a category that has some permission as a default, new users who doesn’t match these permissions won’t have that category in their list
Great… I’ll be using this new feature to add all categories as Watched.. It’s a far better user experience then Mailing list mode, and the unwatch this topic links in the emails are just fantastic.
I assume that people are likely to look at their profile & unwatch topics they don’t have permission to see. They may also wonder why they don’t have that permission. For that reason I have this request to make being added to a group auto-watch categories.
Sure, makes sense. I feel that these defaults are great, and if we can get the act of adding someone to a group makes them auto-watch xyz categories, we have a feature-rich solution.
Once the defaults are set, the users can fend for themselves.
