I am from the same organisation as @rachel-statsnz so we share the same challenges…we really want to prevent content leaks from our gated site, but at the same time email notifications can facilitate user participation.
Regarding the suggestion from our Dear Coding Horror on this subject:
Sort of, you can change the user preference default for email to all off. Then all new (but not existing…) users will have email notifications disabled. However this does not stop users from turning those settings back on.
- How would admins go around disabling notifications for all the users?
Is there a global switch in settings, or per category, or per group of users (level 4 and bellow cannot do it)?
Can an SQL statement to replace a particular setting in the database help here (Data Explorer?) - After that, we would run a SQL query to discover has any of the users turned notifications on, disable it manually and politely ask them not to do that again…