# Exclude staged users from Watching?

**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/exclude-staged-users-from-watching/400361
**Category:** Support
**Tags:** staged-users
**Created:** [April 10, 2026, 1:02am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/exclude-staged-users-from-watching/400361 "2026-04-10T01:02:30Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

### Author: ![bondero](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/b4bc9f/32.png) [@bondero](https://meta.discourse.org/u/bondero)
#### Post date: [April 10, 2026, 1:02am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/exclude-staged-users-from-watching/400361/1 "2026-04-10T01:02:30Z")

</div>

Hiya folks!

I’m selfhosting and I was able to migrate my users and content from google groups, as [here](https://meta.discourse.org/t/migrate-a-mailing-list-to-discourse-mbox-listserv-google-groups-etc/79773/252).

Our forum has an Announcements category and I’d like all our active users to be Watching it. The way I did it was to go to Groups –\> Trust Level 0 –\> Manage –\> Categories –\> add Announcements to Watching. The rationale being that new users start from Trust Level 0, so they’ll automatically be Watching our Announcements. I understand that those settings are additive, so a user with Trust Level 3 is also inheriting the settings for Trust Level 0.

Well, my imported users that are Staged, are all Trust Level 1. I think I’d prefer my staged users to NOT be Watching, until they come in and activate their accounts.

Is my setup sane, is there a different way that I could be getting to my desired outcome?

---

_[View the full topic](https://meta.discourse.org/t/exclude-staged-users-from-watching/400361)._