Users in mailing list mode are not receiving email notifications when a topic is moved from a secure category (e.g., Staff) to a public one, despite gaining access. This impacts workflows where topics are drafted privately before being published publicly, causing power users to miss important announcements. wesochuck documented the issue and confirmed it persists in version 3.3.0.beta2 wesochuck. RGJ identified the root cause — the system never triggers notifications for this specific scenario — and proposed a fix by calling :notify_mailing_list_subscribers within the NotifyCategoryChange job, which was verified to work. The Discourse team confirmed they would accept a PR for this fix lindsey. jyuvaraj03 submitted a PR, which was subsequently merged by zogstrip. The bug has been resolved and is tagged as ‘fixed’.
Post a topic in a secure category that the user doesn’t have access to (e.g. Staff)
Change the category to of the topic to a public category that the user does have access to
The mailing list mode user will never get an email notification of the topic
This affects us on a regular basis because we typically jointly compose topics in a DRAFT mode in our staff category before pushing them out to our users. We also have several power users in our forum that use mailing list mode to make sure they “don’t miss anything” and of course, in this case, they end up missing some of our most public announcements.
