Is there any admin setting to disable the "post approved" email that is sent to users?

Feature
1

Hi!,
I am writing to ask a question about the email notifications for the approval process in Discourse. Is there a setting to disable the “post approved” email that is sent to users?

I have noticed that every time I approve or reject a post, the user who submitted the post receives an email notification. This can be annoying and unnecessary for some users, especially if they already use the Discourse app or website to check the status of their posts.

I would like to know if there is a way to turn off these email notifications, or at least make them optional for the users. I have searched the settings and the documentation, but I could not find any option to do that.

If you know how to disable the “post approved” email, or if you have any suggestions or feedback, please let me know. I appreciate your help and cooperation.

1 Like
2

If they see the notification online discourse will not send an email. Is this your main concern?

3

yes, emails for a password reset should be sent only

4

I’m also interested in this. We are building category where posts need to be pre-approved, and the users already know this. An email notification would be noise and contribute towards alert fatigue.

5

This topic addresses a similar issue, but not this particular one.

I’d like to disable “your post was approved” emails for users. Currently we have a) approval needed for all posts (we’re fairly small) and b) emails on for all watched topics. I don’t see a setting that controls other email notifications.

I just tested this with a dummy user and received an email notification if the post was approved after I had logged off the dummy account AND while currently still logged in (I also saw a notification in the notification centre).

6

Hello and welcome :slight_smile:

I’m not sure I’m picking up on the nuance of what the difference is between your use case and the open feature request?

7

Well, they are shown in different contexts and behave differently – one as desired, the other not.

“Your post needs to be approved” is a popup overlay displayed while logged in. I do have email replies enabled so there is a theoretical way it could be displayed when a user is not logged in. However no such email notifications are sent in any case (which is the desired behaviour here).

“Your post was approved” is not a popup overlay, but just appears as a notification in the “notification centre”. In addition to this notification while logged in, an email is sent a) if a post via the web was approved when a user is logged in, b) if a post via the web was approved when a user was logged out, and c) if a reply sent by email was approved when a user was logged in. I don’t want email notifications for this event sent in any condition.

So I’m wondering if there is a way to turn this off. Presumably there is a setting I’ve missed?

8

Ah, I see. I wonder if that feature request is more about the ‘post approved’ notification rather than the ‘post needs approval’ step. :thinking:

9

You’d know better than I would :slight_smile:

For what it’s worth, I’m not sure where/if either of those email notifications can be controlled at the granular level.

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10

Sorry, I got distracted checking if there was an email sent out for ‘post pending approval’ :slight_smile: (I don’t think there is).

Unfortunately, there isn’t currently a setting to turn off specific email notifications.

11

:thinking: What happens if the email template is overridden to a blank value?

Will it send a blank email?

If so, an interesting hack might be if we modified Discourse to not send the email if the template was blank.

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12

Interestingly, there doesn’t appear to be a template for it, just an option for text customization.

image

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13

From the look of it, I don’t think there is a customisable template for the post_approved one. But I like the idea. That said, a checkbox to ‘suppress email template’ might work on that page too.

14

Since the wording is different from above searching for “post approved” won’t find it, but search for post_approved taken from the other key and you’ll find:

image
image1383×893 47.8 KB

“that page” being the translation override screen?

Also, I think we should talk about notifications rather than emails since the only reason it’s an email is the user wasn’t active?

15

No, sorry. I was looking at /admin/customize/email_templates

I think the onsite notification can be desirable, just not the email. Though it may be horses for courses.

I think this is the same issue as the feature request, so I’ll combine the two.

1 Like
17

Just a quick clarification that in this case, emails are sent regardless of whether the user is logged on or not.