Group notification settings

Hello!

I need to create a group for the research project, and I need for ALL the members to receive notifications of new posts and replies.

Is this possible?

Gracias!

For messages: You can set the default notification level for groups to watching. But you can’t prevent people from changing that later after they join the group.

For topics it is already set to normal by default, which means that when you @ mention groups they will be notified.

But maybe you are talking about category settings. You can set this for new users in /admin/site_settings/category/user_preferences.

There is a plugin for enforcing this for users later to prevent them from unwatching a category.

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Thanks, I will try that!

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If your site is hosted by us, we can help you set the notification level for specific categories on your site for existing users. For new users, you can add the group’s categories to you site’s default categories watching or default categories tracking settings.

If you use PMs instead of a protected category for group communication, setting the group’s default notification level should accomplish what you are looking for.

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@tobiaseigen, can you help me understand how a user can update their personal notification level for groups? I don’t see any settings for this in User Preferences or anywhere in the the group portal.

Thanks

The notification level for group messages can be set from a users Messages page. After selecting the inbox that you want to configure, a notification level button will appear:

Thanks @simon,

Something interesting to note that I stumbled upon while trying to understand why this wasn’t showing up on my messages page. A group inbox only appears on a user’s Messages page if that user has permission to view the group’s members.

E.g. If I set a group’s Who can see this group’s members? setting to Group Owners, then a regular group member will not have this inbox on their messages page.

An implication of this is that I can be in a group for which I’m unable to change my notification level for group messages… is that desired?

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That doesn’t sound like the desired behaviour. I can’t think of any other places in Discourse where a user is not able to control their notification level. I’ll test this out myself and report back here.

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I’ve had a look at setting the notification level for group messages when the group’s “Who can see this group’s members?” setting is set to Group owners (or Group owners and staff.) When a group is configured in this way, there is no inbox displayed for the group on the messages tab for members who are not group owners.

When I test this on my development site, the other thing that stood out was that the member who is not an owner receives notifications about group messages, but the message is not displayed in the user’s inbox. The message exists in the inbox, but no link is displayed to access it. The user can access the group’s message from their inbox by going to /u/<username>/messages/group/<group_name>, but no link to that path is displayed for them. The user can also see the group’s messages from the group’s Messages tab.

If the views the PM and clicks on its PM icon, they will be taken to /u/<username>/messages/group/<group_name>. On that page they can set their notification level for each group PM, but can not set a default status for all PMs sent from the group:

There is an issue with the notification button in the screenshot. Unless someone knows what is causing the issue, I’ll test all this again on a production site.

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