Does reassigning a category send a new email out to the group watching the new category? Sometimes people categorize topics incorrectly, probably like this and need to be re-assigned by a moderator. Once that is done, will the new set of people monitoring the category get notified?
Nope, it does not send out a new notification by email if a post is moved to a new category after the ninja edit window has elapsed. It also won’t send out a new notification if you edit it later to mention somebody.
First half is good but
No this is not true; unless you have muted a topic (or turned off all notifications) it will always notify someone who is @name mentioned even if that mention is added in an edit after the fact.
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Really? I will have to test this. 
Learning new things every day…
Even a group? So if someone forgets to mention a group and I or a moderator go in and mention the group later everyone will be notified? That would be excellent!
Except in private messages – a @name message in a private message is a wholly different concept. For what I hope are obvious reasons…
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yeah, or a @ mention in a private category the mentioned user does not have access to.
So let me add another scenario here: what happens if I first publish a post in the staff category (and perhaps edit it there a couple of times) before finally moving it to a public category?
There are two questions here, one of which I think I can answer:
- As stated by @tobiaseigen above, people watching the public category will not be notified about the new post. But will they be notified if I use a topic timer to move the topic from staff to public? - I suppose yes, but is it so?
- What if I mentioned a non-staff user in that post? I’m assuming that mentioning someone in a category to which that user has no access will not trigger a notification. But will that user be notified when I move the category (a) by ordinary moving, (b) using the topic timer?
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On my dev instance I just tried these steps:
- User1 sets “Announcements” category to “Watching”
-
User2 performs these actions:
-
Private message (publish timer)
- Create a private message with self, set timer to publish to “Announcements”
-
Staff only topic (publish timer)
- Create a topic in a staff only category, set timer to publish to “Announcements”
-
Private message (manual publish)
- Create a private message with self, click Make Public Topic (screenshot here)
- This creates a public “Uncategorised” topic, so move manually to “Announcements”
-
Mention in PM
- Create a private message with self, mentioning User1.
- Click Make Public Topic
-
Private message (publish timer)
None of these scenarios result in a notification to User1. To confirm my test was working, I created a topic directly in “Announcements”, and a notification was indeed sent.
So, I think there are a few things that need fixing:
- Notifications should be sent when topics are re-categorised by a “publish” topic timer
- Notifications should be sent when the “Make public topic” button is clicked in a PM. Complication here is that the topic is immediately moved to the “Uncategorised” category, so we’d need a UI to choose a category before publishing.
- Add a
:notify_about_postDiscourseEvent for plugins to subscribe to (see here)
Then there’s the question of whether notifications should be sent for “manually” moving topics between categories. Personally I don’t really have a opinion either way, but a change to the existing behaviour was mentioned here.
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Thank you heaps for running all those tests, David, and for listing necessary changes. Given how busy the team is these days, I’d like to point out one change that is really crucial:
I would almost go as far as calling this a bug because in the case of using the publish timer, the user is under the impression of not really publishing the post until the timer does it and hence has a legitimate expectation that the publication by the timer will have exactly the same consequences as a manual one (even the publication time stamp is being reset!).
Not that the other issues don’t need to be addressed, but perhaps not as urgently…
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I think all of these issues are now resolved by
https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commit/ee1eb1a5bd834ed49e7efe2ee58bb567556a8c7c
and
https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commit/147ea37115d043caf6b547933b97eabf34e9f27e
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this is a huge fix - thanks so much. look forward to testing this out.
I had to completely rework my workflow because of this problem with the timed publishing of topics.
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