It would be really useful for some sites if it was possible to change the global notification settings/behavior for all users - similar to what each user can do under their own preferences:
These two global settings in particular would be useful to have
Discourse sites used more as news sites or email lists
Discourse sites where users only visit once a week or a few times a month and loose track of what is new
Discourse sites, like ours, where the home page is top topics / hot topics and thus not showing the most recent in the top - making it hard to keep old threads alive.
Example
Our site has the hot topic filtering as the home page, which works great for our purpose - which is mainly news based discussions. However, we have some topics, like this one - “What are you listening to” or “UX Toolbox” which are supposed to live on forever - however after some time they get buried under other threads and die.
Quite some people have liked the threads - some people commented - we want everybody who either commented or liked the topics to get notified per default if anything happens in the threads
I totally support adding a new default here like we do for all user prefs.
Regarding “auto track on like” we would first need a user preference for that:
“Automatically [do nothing | track | watch] topics I like” I think it is a reasonable default to automatically track topics you like. @codinghorror thoughts on such a new setting.
Watching topics you like is more of a “nice to have” from our side. Not completely sure about the use case for that - but i see clear use cases for watching topics users comment on. It is basically how facebook’s notifications are set up
Yes, this pref makes more sense, right now if you reply to a topic the state is set to “track”, but making that a user pref to “watch” is reasonable. (Does beg the question about other scenarios, unfortunately, implying a preferences explosion…)
Adding a whole new pref around what happens when you like, I don’t support. Virtually nobody is asking for this @sam
cough this already exists, what is asked for here is a site setting to control the default, which I totally support, its the way it works with all the rest
