I think this might be a bug since I could not find any other topics about it or related settings. I’ve only seen topics regarding the opposite problem of notifications being wrongly sent: Newly-created "unlisted" Topics send "new topic" Notifications
Steps to reproduce:
Create an new, unlisted topic
Before posting, click the and select the Toggle Unlisted option
After creating the unlisted topic, list the topic
Notice that users do not receive notifications in Discourse or emails after the topic is listed.
Expected behavior
users should not get notifications when the unlisted topic is created
This works as expected.
users should get notifications once the topic is unlisted
This does not work as expected.
Is this the intended behavior? Is there a setting to make it so users will get notifications only once the topic is listed?
My use-case for this is to create an unlisted topic to use as a draft. I do this for announcement posts which I will edit until they are ready. Only once the draft is complete do I want to list the topic for the public and have them get notifications.
I suppose as a workaround, I can create an unlisted draft topic and then copy/paste the contents to a new topic once I’m ready to publish then delete the original draft.
Just to note, Unlisted topics aren’t the best for creating a draft topic. If you create one in a permission-controlled category (eg. #staff) and then recategorise it whenever you’re ready, that works pretty well. Or you can set up Shared Drafts by adding a category to your shared drafts category admin setting. That allows you to create a limited visibility topic and then publish to the correct category when ready.
(Both of those need disable category edit notifications and disable tag edit notifications to be left default off to send out the notifications)
But I’ll attempt a repro of this bug and see what I can find out.
I’ve given the initial bug report a run-through and it seems to be working as usual.
As test user (TL1), set a category to Watching First Post
As admin, create a new topic in that category and toggle it as ‘Unlisted’ before posting
A notification is sent out to the test user:
The test user also receives notifications of Likes, Mentions and Replies for things while the topic was Unlisted as well:
You wouldn’t normally get another notification on Listing/Unlisting, so that’s working as normal too - though it does now appear in the topic list with an Unread count:
But, for those reasons, Unlisting a topic to create a draft isn’t the recommended way as it’s often noisier than you’d think. Hopefully you got on better with the Shared Drafts.
and select the 
I didn’t know about “share drafts” - I love it! Thanks so much.
