As far as I can tell there is no way to prevent a user from muting a category. I use the “Site Feedback” category for discussions with users, and for announcements. I also have a separate read only category for User Guides.
Many of our users are only interested in some categories, and only use the email functionality, so they mute everything else. This is fine until I make an announcement, or explain some feature in one of the two categories above. If the user has those categories muted then they won’t see that info.
Some way of making a category unmutable would be useful.
I don’t think such a feature would ever be planned.
You are basically saying, I want to ignore when a user explicitly said they do not want emails from me and still send it to them cause I know better than the user. I am pretty sure this violates some laws somewhere
Why not simply set it so users default watch the categories you want? Why are your users muting your categories if they don’t want to mute them?
I am aware of the paradox. Some paradoxes are entertaining.
Some of our users are in such a hurry to set their preferences so that they only get emails from the category that interests them that they just mute everything. This includes the 2 categories which I use to help the community get around the system, and make announcements. (which is why I’ve set them to default watched).
Rather than deal with a horde of outraged meatbags mailing my helpme@ email account individually if we at some point change some function which affects them, I’d like a simple way of ensuring that I can place a warning, guide, or explanation somewhere and be sure that whoever is active on the site will see it within a reasonable period of time (say… just longer than the digest mail period, for example).
Honest, I’m not trying to tell them what to do… I’m just trying to avoid large numbers of them asking me individually what to do (which often involves them telling me what I should have done) - this is also a paradox, of the less entertaining kind.
But then I’d have to make every topic in those two categories a Banner topic, wouldn’t I? I must confess, I haven’t really followed any of the discussion about banner topics.
There can only ever be one Banner topic at a time. My take on prioritization is:
global notice
for the most important information only
display near the top of every page
can not be discussed, they are not topics
can not be dismissed
banner topic
very important information
display near the top of every page unless dismissed
globally pinned topics
important information
display near the top of the Latest list unless unpinned
pinned topics
important category specific information
display near the top of their category’s list unless unpinned
I guess if you have that much truly important site-wide information the best would be to either have it all in one topic, or have the one topic linking to the other topics
It isn’t so much that I have all that much truly important site wide information, it’s more that I don’t see why I should have to do anything more than create a topic in certain specific places to communicate.
If a user chooses to rarely, or never login to the live site that is their choice, but I’d prefer to have an open channel when I wish to communicate.
Similarly for users who work in the web interface, if I implement some feature and write a guide about how to use it, then I would like every user to see that.
