The discussion revolves around the issue of triggering notifications when updating topics in a watched category, specifically the “Announcements” category. olegbc1 wants to update the Community Guidelines topic without sending notifications to all users who are watching the category. codinghorror suggests moving the topic to a different category, making the edit, and then recategorizing it, but olegbc1 points out that this would still trigger a notification. After testing, olegbc1 confirms that moving a topic triggers a notification, and now considers submitting a feature request for “forced silent updates.”
Our forum implementation has an “Announcements” category, and all user accounts are automatically watching the first post in it. We’ve also put our Community Guidelines topic in there and have not realized that when we make updates to the guildelines, most users would get email notifications about it.
As such, is there a way to create or edit a topic in this category without triggerring notifications? I don’t want to override the setting for all users permanently.
You seem to want contradictory things, I’m not sure how to resolve that. Perhaps put the less essential things in a different category?
This is a fair assessment and I appreciate you taking the time to answer. The dilema is that we want to keep the Community Guidelines in a category where it would be percieved to apply across the whole forum, not just specific to a category where we’d move it. As such “Announcements” makes most sense within our structure. But the drawback is that every edit will trigger notifications that it would make sense to avoid sometimes.
Or put them in a different category, make the edit, then recategorize them? 
Wouldn’t moving a topic back into Announcements trigger a notification?
I’m not sure. But I can’t think of anything else when you want conflicting behavior? Maybe test it out and see.
Just tested. Yep moving a topic triggers a notification 
Perhaps a feature request for forced silent updates is in order?