Set category notification state historically

[wesochuck (Wes Osborn)]

@codinghorror

I think this has to be a pop up dialog that is triggered by setting the notification state for the category.

It should probably be something like

Category Notifications
You will begin watching any newly created topics in the bugs category.
Do you want to watch all 3,906 existing topics in the bugs category, too?
Yes, watch all No, just new cancel

So this would also let you reset watch state on a category, e.g. set all topics in that category to “regular” when you had it set to “tracked” for a few days.

Bumping this feature request in light of the fact that I just now realized this is why some of my users weren’t getting notifications:

Urgent: help troubleshoot missing notifications for watched categories

I guess I was the idiot that thought the answer to this question would be Yes. Even though I’ll admit that the label clearly says otherwise: You will automatically watch all new topics in these categories. You will be notified of all new posts and topics, and a count of new replies will appear for these topics. So for our low volume list, I guess our options are: Put the user account in mailing list mode (Send me an email for every new post (unless I mute the topic or category)) Not like…

I wonder if instead of burdening the user with a choice regarding Watching all previous topics, if this couldn’t be a decision for the Forum admin? I presume that one of the reasons for having it only Watch new posts for users is performance related on large forums.

Maybe the admin could set an option that when the Watch option was selected on a category it also sets the user to Watch any topics that are NN days old. To simplify both the coding and the admin of the feature, I would be fine if it was a global setting and not a per category setting. So the UI drop down in those cases would read:

You will automatically watch all new topics in these categories and any topics that are NN days old. You will be notified of all new posts and topics, and a count of new replies will appear for these topics.

It seems to me that this could help more quickly on-board users into conversations as well. So they wouldn’t feel “left out” by not getting notifications on more recent topics that had active conversations they might want to participate in.