Procedurally nullify notifications for a group

Support
1

TLDR: Feb 2024 Google is changing their acceptable spam ratio to 0.3%. I want to reduce outbound email volume to avoid getting flagged. (3 spam flags/1000 emails will get your domain blacklisted). I need to procedurally change ‘watching first post’ for certain groups.

My nonprofit is a physical organization that uses discourse to facilitate member/community engagement. In particular, we opt new members into mandatory notifications regarding our organization (meeting agendas, votes, and critical updates. We’re legally allowed and obligated to send these emails).

  • Currently: Our member portal adds new discourse users via API, and assigns them to ‘current_members’ group so long as they are in good standing.
  • Current members’ group is set to Categories: Watching First Post: Official Announcements.

So far so good.

  • When they quit/expire, we (api) move them to ‘former_members’ for a variety of permissions. When members expire/quit/etc, we keep their account active as a ‘public non member’ permission level so they can still engage with the community.
  • Goal: Remove the watch-first-post elective on group-add.
Screenshots

Former Member Group Settings
Former Member Group Settings648×806 27.3 KB

Group settings assign no watch.

Example Former Member
Example Former Member545×602 12.9 KB

Group member still has watch.

  • Moving to a group seems only to be additive. Is there a way to designate ‘remove’ tracking based on group add?
  • Is there a way to remove track settings that were added by group membership? (ie on group leave, undo whatever was added).

Alternatively, we could use @ tagging, but it would super easy to accidentally abuse. Having the groups manage the notification level would be easiest.

2

I think that’s what to do. Remove those watched categories when they leave. You can Reverse engineer the Discourse API to find the API call to change their watched categories.

3

The trouble is I have hundreds of users in this boat. Setting it up for future is bonus but having an explicit null empty list would be a great feature.

4

Then a rails command that removed watches for the users from the expired group might be a solution. I can’t remember if changing the setting for the group will offer to apply it to all members. You might give that a go (make the expired group watch the category and then remove that watch?)

5

I’ll give that a shot. I know the addition of a watch will offer recursive. I couldn’t find a way to remove a watch that wasn’t there. You’re right it might be a matter of adding and removing.

6

This is the magic. Adding to a group that lacks the flag doesn’t assert removal of the flag - that would be a nightmare to maintain…but retroactively applying the flag and then removing the flag to the group works as a decent workaround if I only have to do it annually-ish.

#feature-request - ability to assert a ‘nullify’ category or tag on group add would be sweet.

cat tax
cat tax1181×889 116 KB