Good points @Mittineague but where I need this is in cases where:
- there is a new feature in discourse and I need to set its value for everyone retroactively
- if I add a new Category and want it to be in everyone’s Watch list by default (they can unfollow if they want)
- if we are generally changing how the forum works for whatever internal politicking reason.
In all of these cases, the need here is to be able to Fix Our Forum for our users. If I expected to have to use this feature regularly on the same setting, I’d be asking for a way to lock the preference in place.
If I were starting a discourse now, I may not need this as much, at least not until I added a new category, or the next new feature in discourse was added) As it stands, the 4 Discourse I manage all had many users were created before we (as discourse admins) even had a chance to set the desired defaults.