Discourse constantly generating invisible welcome topics on its own

[themightychris]

I’m using the discourse-webhooks plugin to push alerts when new topics are created to other mediums and it’s caused me to notice that my discourse forum is generating a new welcome topic that isn’t discoverable via the UI every 1-4 days. They don’t even come up in search but a topic_created event is firing for them and they’re reachable via their permalink only if I’m logged in:

• http://forum.codeforphilly.org/t/welcome-to-code-for-philly-public-forum/196
• http://forum.codeforphilly.org/t/welcome-to-code-for-philly-public-forum/197
• http://forum.codeforphilly.org/t/welcome-to-code-for-philly-public-forum/198
• http://forum.codeforphilly.org/t/welcome-to-code-for-philly-public-forum/199
• http://forum.codeforphilly.org/t/welcome-to-code-for-philly-public-forum/200
• http://forum.codeforphilly.org/t/welcome-to-code-for-philly-public-forum/201

They all look like this:

What’s the deal with these? Can I disable them? Is there a reliable way for me to identify and ignore them? I’m running 1.4.0beta7

[themightychris]

Shortly after I posted this I finally realized they are private topics being generated for each new user that joins the forum. Looking for a topic attribute I can use to discriminate them, I’ll come back and share if I find one

[riking (Kane York)]

archetype == 'private_message'

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

If you don’t want that turn off the welcome PM for new users via the site settings. There is a Boolean for it.