# How to notify admins of replies to posts by system user?
**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-notify-admins-of-replies-to-posts-by-system-user/62343
**Category:** Support
**Created:** [May 9, 2017, 9:08am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-notify-admins-of-replies-to-posts-by-system-user/62343 "2017-05-09T09:08:48Z")
**Posts on this page:** 8
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@tophee](https://meta.discourse.org/u/tophee)
#### Post date: [May 9, 2017, 9:08am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-notify-admins-of-replies-to-posts-by-system-user/62343/1 "2017-05-09T09:08:48Z")
Is there a way of getting notified when someone replies to a post owned by the system user? For obvious reasons, I wouldn’t want to [set the `site contact username` to a real person](https://meta.discourse.org/t/access-to-system-messages/51490) but I’d like to know when people reply, for example to the welcome message, a category definition or other system owned posts (yes, people do that). A similar problem might occur when people try to send messages to system, I suppose.
Options considered and dismissed (for now):
- change ownership of the topics in question
- close these topics to avoid replies
---
### Author:  [@fefrei](https://meta.discourse.org/u/fefrei)
#### Post date: [May 9, 2017, 9:11am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-notify-admins-of-replies-to-posts-by-system-user/62343/2 "2017-05-09T09:11:49Z")
> [@tophee](#):
>
> For obvious reasons
What obvious reason? Changing this setting is _the_ way to solve these problems 😉
---
### Author:  [@tophee](https://meta.discourse.org/u/tophee)
#### Post date: [May 9, 2017, 9:29am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-notify-admins-of-replies-to-posts-by-system-user/62343/3 "2017-05-09T09:29:02Z")
When I initially set up my site, I saw that many admins had been complaining about drowning in (useless) notifications so I thought it was wise to let these go to system. If I’m not mistaken, that was the basic idea of having the system user in the first place, no? So my question was basically "how to notify admins _only_ of replies to posts by system user (and PMs).
But I might have to reconsider. But I’m not yet convinced that this is “_the_ way to solve these problems”. To start with, if I’d change the site contact username to myself now, would I be notified of replies to posts owned by system?
Another thing is that the messages would still go to _one_ admin whereas it would make sense to have all (or selected) admins notified, similar to flags. I could come up with feature requests now, but I’m assuming that this is a somewhat common problem so that it’s probably been solved somehow.
---
### Author:  [@codinghorror](https://meta.discourse.org/u/codinghorror)
#### Post date: [May 9, 2017, 10:26am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-notify-admins-of-replies-to-posts-by-system-user/62343/4 "2017-05-09T10:26:35Z")
Check the system user periodically? I dunno, at some level, users who try talking to a wall are.. talking to a wall. All you can do is make the wall more .. clearly labeled a wall?
Discobot explicitly tells people to [go to the `/about` page](https://meta.discourse.org/about) and use that information if they want to talk to a real human being.
---
### Author:  [@system](https://meta.discourse.org/u/system)
#### Post date: [June 3, 2019, 11:39am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-notify-admins-of-replies-to-posts-by-system-user/62343/5 "2019-06-03T11:39:17Z")
---
### Author:  [@sam](https://meta.discourse.org/u/sam)
#### Post date: [June 5, 2019, 12:32am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-notify-admins-of-replies-to-posts-by-system-user/62343/6 "2019-06-05T00:32:07Z")
Also these days we allow the site contact to be a group, which kind of lets you have the cake and eat it at the same time.
---
### Author:  [@system](https://meta.discourse.org/u/system)
#### Post date: [November 3, 2022, 3:21am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-notify-admins-of-replies-to-posts-by-system-user/62343/7 "2022-11-03T03:21:14Z")
---
### Author:  [@JammyDodger](https://meta.discourse.org/u/JammyDodger)
#### Post date: [November 4, 2022, 6:38am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-notify-admins-of-replies-to-posts-by-system-user/62343/8 "2022-11-04T06:38:29Z")