It would be awesome to allow users to set their notification preferences per category. Currently you receive new topics in all categories in your digest, unless you mute them. But if you enable mailing list mode, this changes to every post unless muted. Now people might want to not hear anything about category A, only receive new topics from category B, and follow every new post from category C.
Adding to this it should be possible to set these notifications to either instant or every X hours/days.
To crown it all the ability to preset this for new users would be amazing.
With this added featureset Discourse can match up with mailing lists and the barrier for those many people loving email would be small.
AI-generated summary
Users are discussing the need for per-category email notification settings in Discourse. Wowl proposes allowing users to customize digest and mailing list mode notifications by category—e.g., receive new topics from Category B, every post from Category C, and nothing from Category A—rather than relying on muting as a workaround. downey notes that users can currently “Watch” a category to receive notifications for all new topics or posts within it, but this isn’t granular enough. Wowl acknowledges this as a partial workaround but stresses the need for proper, built-in preference controls. codinghorror suggests the digest email should better respect muted categories, asking users to verify if muted categories are still appearing in their digest. zogstrip confirms this behavior was already handled and added a test to ensure it doesn’t regress, referencing a GitHub commit from April 17, 2021, indicating the fix has been in place for some time. The core request remains: users want fine-grained, category-specific notification controls beyond muting or watching, ideally configurable per category for digest, mailing list, or instant notifications.
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It’s currently possible to go to a category page, e.g., https://meta.discourse.org/c/feature, and “Watch” a category so you get notifications for every post/topic in that category. It’s done the same way as watching/tracking/muting a specific topic.
Thank you, I’m aware of that option. It is a workaround - and will do until somewhen such specific preferences can be implemented.
The digest email should do a better job of paying attention to your muted categories, at least. Can you add this to your list @zogstrip? Make sure the digest does not pick any topics in categories you have muted.
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Was already handled. I just added a spec to make sure it doesn’t break but I’m fairly confident that it has always worked since it was originally added (April 17th, 2014)
https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commit/fd5677808cea3b4868c6bfe508eeea9a26ed49a4
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