In a UX-focused discussion titled ‘Mentioning @trust_level_0’, alehandrof reports that mentioning @trust_level_0 or large groups in Discourse fails to notify all intended users, despite expectations. Testing revealed that the max users notified per group mention setting (default: low) silently blocks notifications when exceeded — even though the admin UI explains this, the in-context warning does not. alehandrof proposes improving the warning to clarify how many users would be notified and why it’s blocked. Additionally, messaging @trust_level_0 appears capped at 10 recipients, possibly due to a separate setting like max allowed message recipients (default: 30), as suggested by DeanMarkTaylor. rizka confirms the misleading warning has caused real-world issues, with large-scale notifications failing unnoticed for years. The thread highlights a critical UX gap where system limits aren’t clearly communicated during use, risking miscommunication in community management.
I just sent a message on my system mentioning a sub-group (@foo), as well as @trust_level_0. Another group (@bar) is set to “watch first post” on that category.
What I thought would happen: everyone in my system would get the message.
What actually happened: only the members of @foo, @bar and those who have enabled “mailing list mode” received the message.
OK, I figured most of this out. (Isn’t realtime reporting fun? )
Apparently, there’s a setting called max users notified per group mention, which (you guessed it) limits the max number of users that can be notified by a mention.
Setting it to a high value like 9999 (we only have 400 users) looks like it works as expected.
The admin screen clearly describe what this setting does:
Maximum number of users that may receive a notification if a group is mentioned (if threshold is met no notifications will be raised)
However, this isn’t mentioned when you get the just-in-time warning:
@team, I propose that this is a UX bug. If the number you’re mentioning is higher than the max users notified per group mention setting, then Discourse should extend the above warning with some copy like this:
By mentioning @group_name, you would normally notify X people. But because this exceeds the maximum number of users that may receive a notification, no notifications will be raised.
I’m not sure how exactly multiple group mentions are handled, so I can’t offer suggestions in that case.
In related news, messaging @trust_level_0 also doesn’t seem to work – it only sends 10 messages and then ceases. Is there a similar setting that prevents messaging users? I wasn’t able to find it.
I agree that the warning is very misleading. We have used @trust_level_0 to reach out to our large userbase quite a few times over the time period of nearly two years. Only very recently we learned that nobody received the notification we wanted them to get. See @ljpp’s post:
)