Make members of a group watch a category by default

[alehandrof (Alex Armstrong)]

I’m not sure what the cousins you’re referring to are, but the default categories watching setting doesn’t accomplish the OP’s goal:

Under the category’s security settings, when I say “staff can create/reply/see” I’d love it if there were a way to say “and are watching this category by default”. Then when I add a new member to the staff group, they’d get set up to automatically watch the category. They could override if if they wanted to, but they’d start out by getting all the notifications.

I don’t just mean there’s no UI like that. AFAIK, the only way to get a specific group (not all users) to “watch” (or “watch first post” or whatever) a specific category – and to have that happen after the user has been created – is by using a plugin, such as the one I use.

I’d be happy to ditch this workaround, but I don’t see this functionality in core. Or have I missed something in a recent update?