Managing product announcements with multiple versions

For context, we push all our product announcements through our community. As you’ll see, we have over a dozen products, and many of them have multiple supported versions. Currently, users “subscribe” to an entire product news category, which means they may receive alerts about products they don’t even own/use.

I’m curious how others are balancing something like this. The answer almost certainly has to be tags, right? Subscribe to a tag instead of the full category? And if it’s a SaaS product that updates the version number (monthly, quarterly, etc.), update the tag and/or add synonyms for it?

If that’s the case, how do you inform them that a new version was released? Or there is something newsworthy applicable to all customers of that product (like a feedback session), but they aren’t subscribed to that entire category. Or, similarly, if a new version is released, do you add the tag for all older active versions even though this has nothing to do with those versions?

The root of this problem is that a product has shifted from a version that received updates every few months to one that will get updates biweekly.

I’m trying to get ahead of the wave of notifications that some people may not appreciate. Any suggestions are welcome :slight_smile:

I would say yes to tags. I would use categories for the high level content types, not for every product/version combination.

So there might be categories for:

  • Product Announcements
  • Release Notes
  • News

And tags for:

  • product: 1secure, auditor
  • version: 1secure-dpsm, release-minor, etc.

Discourse supports fairly structured tagging with tag groups, parent-child tag relationships, limiting one tag from a group, and category tag restrictions, so you can keep this from turning chaotic.

Then users can watch or watch-first-post tags, and you can set default tag notification levels.

If you have one release topic tagged with both product and new version

  • category: Release Notes
  • tags: 1secure, v10.8

Anyone watching 1secure gets it.
Anyone watching v10.8 also gets it.

Use the product tag only.

Does that help, or have I missed a nuance?