Mute category to mute all children categories

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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Letā€™s say the board Iā€™m 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 donā€™t 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 ā€œInherit 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 wasnā€™t 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 doesnā€™t 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:

image

Years have passed here, but this niggle is impacting our own staff quite a lot, I agree the ā€œauto 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! :alarm_clock:

(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 ā€œnever 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, Iā€™m 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 donā€™t 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 ā€œnever been setā€ topic state to the category state without actually changing the state of individual topics. But until that is done, Iā€™d be really worried about making Tracking/Watching a category also Track/Watch all of its subcategories since that action canā€™t be fully undone.

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Oh very good point here Sean.

Yeah letā€™s 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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