Exclude staged users from Watching?

Hiya folks!

I’m selfhosting and I was able to migrate my users and content from google groups, as here.

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?