I feel like I am missing an easy solution to something that probably happens in a lot of forums:
I am the moderator of a forum and read all new threads. All posts in one of the categories need to be handled by a separate team (similar to I assume #hosting). As this team doesn’t read the forum otherwise they watch the category and therefore get an email every time a new question is asked and can answer it. This works well until some user asks their question in another category. I then move the question to the right category, but the team doesn’t get an email (as it isn’t a new post). So for them to get an E-Mail I need to invite them manually which is a bit cumbersome (and they get a Lukas want you to look at this post... mail instead of a there is a new thread mail).
Am I missing some easy solution/setting for this?
Even worse it is with staff tags: There is another user who doesn’t read every post on the forum but still wants to be informed when something interesting or something requiring their help happens. As invites get complicated to keep an overview, I tried out using using a tag only visible to staff. That way they can see all “invited” posts in one nice list. But even though they are watching the tag, they don’t get notifications as the tag is always added after posting to the thread.
Again, is there some easier way? I expect that the Discourse Team internally has a similar workflow, so I would be surprised if there wasn’t another way to do this.
I tested it again by creating a post and then adding the staff tag to it. The watching user can see the post (and the staff tag) in the New and Latest list, but they don’t have any notification in their notification list and no E-Mail was sent.
Am I misunderstanding the concept of watching a tag/category?
I have just tested this with tags on my local development site and on https://try.discourse.org/. When a user is watching a tag, they will receive a notification for topics that are given the tag when the topic is first created, but editing an existing topic to add a watched tag is not creating a notification.
When a user is watching a category, recategorizing an existing topic to the watched category is creating a notification for me on https://try.discourse.org/.