The discussion revolves around disabling post notifications for a specific topic in a Discourse community. bufordtaylor explains that a surge of invite-only users creates a high volume of posts in an ‘Introduce yourself’ topic, leading to spam concerns. While emails are turned off to combat spam, legitimate posts are also missed by users. codinghorror suggests that users can mute the topic, but for a bulk solution, a Rails command can update user preferences to change the notification level. bufordtaylor confirms that setting the notification level to 1 (Regular) via Topic.find(id).topic_users.update_all(notification_level: 1) achieves the desired result, ensuring users receive notifications without being overwhelmed. pfaffman proposes an alternative: creating a dedicated category for such introductions, allowing users to manage their notification preferences more granularly.
Our community has a surge of invite-only users all at once (roughly 400 of them) every few months. We make a new topic called “Introduce yourself to the Community” where all 400 people can say a few words.
In order to combat spam, we turn off all emails while this particular thread is live, but it’s not ideal because legitimate topics are posted and do not surface in the users’ inboxes.
Is there a way to disable all notifications for this one topic? (or disable all notifications for posts on this one topic)
I’ve installed discourse on digital ocean and am happy to do anything within the console. I had a look through the code but didn’t find anything relevant.
Users can mute the topic, that’s all I can think of at the moment.
You could run a Ruby/Rails command at the Rails command line to mute the topic for all existing users by updating their user preferences, but new users who sign up after you run that command will not have the topic muted.
Do note that only people with that topic in a “watched” state will get emailed for new replies, and even then, only if their web browser has not pinged the website in the last 10 minutes. So you could target this a little more surgically to update all user preferences from “watched” or “tracked” to “normal” on this particular topic. Perhaps @techapj could advise on the exact Rails command?