I think this is more logical. In case, we want to exclude a specific child category, just insert it to watch.
What do you guys think about this ?
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Letās say the board Iām on has the following category structure:
- foo
- bar
- wimble
- wobble
- wabble
- baz
I want to mute bar (and therefore the subcategories underneath it), but leave bar|wobble as it is normally. My understanding of your suggestion is that my only option is to Watch or Track bar|wobble? What if I just want bar|wobble topics to default to Regular?
I donāt know, maybe, its such and edge area of the system I am not sure I can justify making changes to it now.
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Muting sub-categories would very much be the expected behaviour.
The way to implement this cleanly (from a user perspective) would be to add a new notification mode to sub-categories called āInherit from parentā and make this the default. Users could then explicitely set the notification level for sub-categories if they so choose.
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Sorry for bumping this thread.
Can confirm, various users in my forum got confused about muting a category with sub-categories in it. They wondered why it made the category appear twice on the categories page: once dimmed in the primary view, and once hidden away in the collapsible section. It wasnāt obvious to them that they had to also mute the sub-categories in order to hide it completely.
Another potential way to implement this would be asking users whether they would like to mute sub-categories after they chose to mute a top-level category. It doesnāt have to be done automatically, but users need to be made aware of the fact that muting a top-level category may not mute all topics within it.
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@codinghorror, I think it makes sense to revive this. If mute category automatically muted all subcategories the behavior would be more sensible.
This would solve a problem @fitzy and @HAWK are facing today.
Proposal here is as following (considering this hierarchy)
- A
- B
- C
Mute (A) ā¦ (B) and (C) no longer appear in latest and categories unless explicitly tracked
To get (B) back in lists you would set it to Normal
Navigating to (C) you would see:
Years have passed here, but this niggle is impacting our own staff quite a lot, I agree the āauto mute childrenā behavior is more intuitive and there is a super easy opt out.
Thoughts?
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Probably fine, its time has come! 
(The resistance here was mostly about sub-sub-sub-sub-categories being a bad, bad idea. Which they still are.)
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I assume that subcategories should inherit mute state from main category only if nothing was explicitly set before. So if I set B to watching before, then when I mute A, only C will be muted.
Mute is just one example, but how about other notification statuses?
Should we be consistent, and when decide to watch/track A, shall we watch/track B and C or implement that solution only for mute?
Yes, in fact I would just go with a default based on absence of category user record.
Muting (A) in our example above should not fill up this box with B and C automatically.
I guess I do support consistency here. But it should all be based on absense, we should not be creating new rows in the table for sub categories.
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I want to point out a potential risk here due to an already existing inconsistency. Muting a category does not explicitly mute every topic in that category. Rather, it overrides any topic in the ānever been setā state to treat them as if they were set to Muted. However, Tracking/Watching a category explicitly sets every existing and new topic in that category to Tracking/Watching. Importantly, removing a category from Muted basically makes it as if you never added it to Muted to begin with, but removing a category from Tracking/Watching does not undo the fact that every existing topic in that category is still set to Tracking/Watching. It will just no longer Track/Watch new topics in that category.
Personally, Iām still dealing with the fact that I set #support to Tracking once when testing something, because now I occasionally see the unread indicator next to those topics even though I donāt care about them. Now, I think this is something that should change so that Tracking/Watching a category works exactly like Muted, meaning it would override the ānever been setā topic state to the category state without actually changing the state of individual topics. But until that is done, Iād be really worried about making Tracking/Watching a category also Track/Watch all of its subcategories since that action canāt be fully undone.
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Oh very good point here Sean.
Yeah letās scope this super tightly to mute only for now @kris.kotlarek , once we land this change we can think through the other states.
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This feature is done with this PR
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