Hi,
I’m trying to launch a new forum where both teacher and developers could partecipate (to develop tools for school).
I have ‘flashcard’ and ‘dev’ categories and I don’t mean to prevent anybody from seeing the other but I’d like that topics of developers go to teachers that happen to have “mailing list mode” nor as summary as they would be annoyed by incomprehensible messages. I don’t want to prevent them from visiting the category though.
Currently teachers are not even in a category, since the vast majority of users will be teachers I probably could avoid setting the group ‘teacher’ and stay with a group ‘dev’ just to limit visibility of that category
It sounds like you want teachers to be notified about new posts in the ‘dev’ category. If so, the easiest way to accomplish this would be to encourage them to set their notification level for the ‘dev’ category to either ‘Watched’, or ‘Watching first post.’ Users can set their category notification level from the Categories section of their profile page.
You could also force all users on the site to start out watching the ‘dev’ category. To do this, add the category to your site’s default categories watching setting.
If you create a group for your teachers, you can set the default notification level for all members of that group from the group’s Manage / Categories page:
If possible, I think it’s best to allow users to opt into receiving notifications for topics created in a category. That way you don’t risk annoying them with unwanted emails. There will be situations where it’s best to set default notification levels though.
Hi @simon, no really I want to avoid teachers to be notified of ‘dev’ category unless they also joined the ‘dev’ group.
Our average teacher would just be annoyed by ‘dev’ topics. But I (maybe that was a wrong decision) defaulted to “mailing list mode” as they are not used to forum and to start the forum I think they would not visit the site till it’s in the beginning phase.
So I want the ‘dev’ category being sent only to people belonging to ‘dev’ group, even if they’re in ‘mailing list mode’ or ‘summary’
What you might do is contrive a way to mute the dev category for the teachers. You could, perhaps, mute the category for TL1/0 and then put the devs in a group that changes the category to Normal.
Let me understand if I follow you. You suggest to set the category ‘dev’ invisible for TL 1/0:
This would hide dev messages from teachers but would require them to join the dev just to browse the cathegory.
Ideally I would have just wanted to prevent sending email to them not just visiting the ‘dev’ category. Anyhow it’s already a good start. When they get promoted to level_2 they are probably skilled enough to know how to silence the category…
And then in the dev group, you can set them to watch or normal for the dev category. I think that the precedence will work correctly, but haven’t tested it.
This is the setup I was looking for! ‘dev’ category is browsable but in the “muted categories”. Messages in the ‘dev’ categories only are delivered to ‘dev’ users.
One more gotcha: this trick works for new users. Old ones do not behave as desired, I had to change the default behavior for the category via ruby console. It seems there’s a possibility via UI but I could not find it.
If you joindev group you start observing the dev category. If you leavedev group… you continue to see it…
Sounds right. A bunch of things like that give you an option to apply to existing users, but perhaps not this one.
Yup. Basically, if you’re “smart” enough to join the dev group then you need to be smart enough to change your own category watch levels. You could create a plugin that would enforce those without a whole lot of trouble. I think there are some examples around.
